The Heart of My Kitchen

I’ll never forget when I got my recipe box. I bought it for myself, shortly after I got married. The chartreuse-color, French-looking wooden box with a bent spoon for a handle caught my eye at my neighborhood kitchen store and I knew I had to have it. I mean I was now married after all and what young bride doesn’t have a recipe box?!

I also purchased some nicely coordinated recipe cards that day and was so eager to use them. I couldn’t wait to meticulously record my recipes, file them away and have them at the ready for all the meals I would surely be making now that I was married and transitioning into domestic bliss.

Well that didn’t exactly happen. For one thing, I didn’t have many recipes to put in a recipe box and second, I just didn’t cook much back in those days. The truth is, I still have the bulk of those original, blank recipe cards today and my little recipe box has taken on a life of its own.

Through the years, my recipe box slowly filled with handwritten recipe cards from family and friends as one might expect. But there are also sweet mementos like the post-its and handwritten notes from my grandma that came affixed to magazine-clippings of dishes she wanted me to try. There are the cut-out labels from various packaged goods (which always seem to feature the best recipes) that have become family-favorite dishes and part of many of our holiday traditions. There are my grown daughter’s handwritten notes on a recipe (“so fun, so good!”) for Winter Vegetable Stew she made with her 5th grade class. Then there’s the printout for Pineapple Chicken Quesadillas that accompanied a jar of pineapple salsa I picked up in the Marketplace area of the downtown Minneapolis Daytons (circa 1997) for one of the first meals I made where Jaye and I entertained guests in our apartment after we were married. So many memories are housed in this little box!

And, yes there even are a few of my own contributions that actually represent some of my most-used “recipes” that I use to this day. These are the scrawled notes (on my beautiful recipe cards!) that I would write while on the phone in some state of panic with my mom or mother-in-law, for very important things like “hard-boiled eggs,” “Mary Lou’s mashed potatoes” or simply “turkey tips.”

So Much More Than a Recipe Box

Needless to say, my recipe box isn’t the place I go on a daily basis to fetch the recipes I make on a regular basis for my family. I use my cookbooks quite a bit and, probably like most people these days, I view many recipes on a computer (or worse yet, my iPhone…yikes!) while I am cooking. If a recipe is truly worthy, I print it out and it earns a place in a binder I keep tucked in one of several drawers I maintain that hold food magazines, cookbooks and miscellaneous loose recipes—kind of a hot mess of food-related content!

As for my recipe box, it continues to take up important real estate, front and center, on my countertop. It may have a slightly different purpose than I originally intended but it’s more important to me than I could’ve ever imagined. It’s like a little time capsule or miniature hope chest that holds so many cherished memories and treasured keepsakes, capturing sweet moments in time that I don’t want to let go.

I find myself heading to the corner of my kitchen where I keep my recipe box and cracking it open when I am feeling sentimental and want to take a a trip down memory lane, when I just want to hold something a loved one from my past once held or something that has their handwriting…..or when I need to reference that all-important recipe for hard-boiled eggs.