These cookbooks – these wonderful, mysterious, secret, hand-written, seriously messy three-ring binders whose plastic covers contain oil-stained, tomato-juiced, sugary-sticky pages – include family recipes that have traveled my way from my great-grandmothers and beyond via my mother. (She actually took the time to write them out for me by hand so that I would have them when I went to college.)

The binders not only contain family recipes for yummy food, they contain bits of mom-wisdom and home remedies for common ailments. The binders contain recipes that I have gathered over the 36 years of my marriage.

The Gauntlet Has Been Thrown Down

My editor (bless her heart) has challenged me to cook my way through these books and share the results with you. I figure that I will be dead-and-gone before I have finished cooking because there are a lot of recipes in these books!

I suppose I will have to continue cooking from the great beyond. (Either that or require Julianne to continue the project as a condition for inheriting my grandmother’s wedding ring….)

Kidding!

Here’s the truth: The recipes I have been sharing so far have been mined from these binders. I will make an attempt to stay within them, but as I often get distracted, I will not promise that I will never wander away and pull in some other completely tempting recipe from another source.

Besides, my Better Homes and Garden recipe book (the old red-and-white-checked thing) has become sort of a cooking Bible for me. I must be allowed to use it.

And then, there’s my Betty Crocker cookbook. It’s a good one, too. Someone is selling one just like mine on eBay for a small fortune. (The seller says it is old enough to be vintage. Since I got my book as a wedding gift, I suppose that means I am vintage, too.)

And there is the Victorian cookbook I inherited from my grandmother. It’s falling apart, but I suspect that you might be interested in the directions it contains for getting get rid of houseflies.

And then there is all of the neat information my mother just blessed me with as her latest contribution to this blog. It arrived via UPS one cold morning in a big, heavy cardboard box. (I had to clean out a drawer to hold it all.)

And there are more -  many more – ancient, ripped up, torn, bedraggled, cherished volumes of advice and wisdom sitting on my shelves. They are ripe with bits of random information that I know you are dying (or not) to get your eyeballs on.

Ahh… are you curious to know what will appear in the blog next?

Me, too!

My challenge to you:

If you have any bits of random wisdom that you feel my readers are dying to know (or not), just let me know! I’m hoping that this blog will become a collaborative effort so that we will all have more fun!

Talk to you later.