Grandma's wooden recipe boxI've started a new project called simply, Grandma's Recipes. I plan to forage through her wooden recipe box and sort, organize, type, and ultimatly chronical all of her recipes.

The recipes are not organized a la MS Office; they're not even typed. They're written by hand, on index cards of various size and color, or on sheets of folded, lined notebook paper.

There are other recipes that have been cut from newspapers or snipped from magazines, some as far back as fifty years, and some recently from Taste of Home or Bergen Record.

But the format is not the only thing that differs. The ingredients themselves were so different! Recipes did not call for Turbinado Sugar, Agave Sweetener, Himalayan Sea Salt, and organic this or non-hydrogenated that. They call for sugar, salt, and shortening, thusly Grandma used Domino Sugar, Diamond Kosher Salt and Crisco. And guess what? It was delicious, in an inimicable, magical way.

KitchenAid Stand Mixer circa 1960Grandma's most trusty assistant during her fifty plus years of baking and cooking, is still her KitchenAid Stand Mixer that she purchased in 1960 for nearly $200- a lot of money back then! The KitchenAid has retained all it's original working parts and motor. The only thing that has shown signs of age is the writing on the sides and front of the machine. The counter-top machine is nothing short of a testament to old American machinery.

Stay tuned to find out what recipes I find inside the wooden box.