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| Merry Christmas! |
It is very cold here and we are just struggling with this heavy snow fall and terribly low temperatures.
This is a record breaking Winter for us, and it isn't even Winter.
So I am getting to spend some time at the computer. Right now I have a cup of coffee here and a bowl of homemade soup. I just like to cook, but the roads are pretty hazardous, so the pantry is looking a little empty.
This is a good time for simple cooking for me. I learned to cook when I was not quite in grade school. And I was short for my age, but in my family, you had to learn to cook young.
Some of the boys I knew were learning to drive a tractor out in the field or a truck and I envied them somewhat, but I did learn to cook from scratch is what people called it.
All of my life I have seen people who prize their family recipe more than anything else they have in their kitchen. I have tried to pry some of these out of a person before, and it is impossible to do.
So when I thought of writing a cookbook of my own, with no experience at this at all, I thought of the years I had cooked, the people I had taught, and the numbers I had fed at one time, from two to three hundred!
That is what happened. It took a while, but I did write my first cookbook with no other reason than this:
Hard Times
From my own experience and tales people have told me over the years, I know we can't always go to the grocery store and buy whatever we want. Many people have really had to cut down on grocery buying, even when their own families which they had to feed got larger. I have been there.
The second reason I wrote my first cookbook is many people kept asking me to show them how to cook this or that. You would be surprised how many times that can happen. I have even shown a would-be cook how to crack an egg.
There is a third reason I wrote my first cookbook. I wanted to share some recipes which I had developed myself over the years. I would have loved to have had some of those recipes people sometimes carried to their grave, seriously.
But now, people through the Internet have access to all sorts of how to books and there are recipe books galore. I think that is wonderful and a service to mankind.
But I still had this nagging desire which wouldn't quit, to share some of my own cooking knowledge with others, so finally I gave up my own fight against doing this, and started writing.
I have written three cookbooks so far, and thinking of a fourth. And I am grateful this Holiday Season that I was able to get these out to people I can share this simple, frugal, cooking handed down to me.
Again, Happy Holidays!
