Menu Memories

 
Today, I decided that I needed to make one tiny space in my house look like something other than an episode of Hoarders. OK, the smallest space is the upstairs bathroom.

That included a shelf where the overflow of recipe books has had a home. I sorted multiple notebooks of recipes I'll never try (but once thought I might), put a 15" stack of recipe books in the giveaway pile, and had quite a few smiles from records I'd kept over the years.

My relationship with cooking has been... long. I keep saying I completed my lifetime quota of cooking more than ten years ago. I don't find any particular pleasure in cooking, but if I'm going to do it, I want to do it well. And now, I like my own cooking better than most everything I can get by eating out unless it costs WAY too much. However, I'm pretty content on the rare occasions when food just appears at mealtime, and I didn't have to do anything to make that happen.

With all that introduction, here are some menu memories for you to chuckle over. First up, we have bicycle trips. I cooked at first out of the back of a trailer, and then out of the back of a bus, for 20-50 people for weeks on end.



Just in case teenagers weren't hungry enough already, have them ride a bicycle 100 miles and then see what they can eat.



Here's the beginning of page one of the kitchen equipment.



And the step-by-step for Cream of Wheat for 40-45.


Moving along to when we had boys of our own. They pretty much thought they were going to die if I wasn't home to cook. I'm pretty sure this menu page is from a week that I made a trip to Illinois. I packed separate boxes and labeled everything and left instructions. They seem to have all lived.


One of the things I liked to do each year was fix a big fancy Christmas feast to which we invited a number of friends. We could seat about 18, which this page says we did have in 1989.



I was able to match the menu page with an actual picture of that meal.


And last, and perhaps most amusing, is a list (who knows why I saved it) that I made to help us through the 9 months that Omer, Steve, and I lived in a 20x20 space with no stove or oven while the house we are in now was being built. We had a fridge, an electric frypan and a microwave.



I listed meals that could be cooked with those appliances and no oven.


Once again, we can safely say that no one starved during that time period.

This post was a little more personal than some, but I got such a kick out of finding these things. It's really what today was about.

And what did I have for dinner? A microwaved potato with butter and greens on top. Fancy cookin' eh?

Oh, and I did finish cleaning that one bathroom.

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