The Recipe Binder

I am not much of a cook—nor was my mother before me. My daughter recently invited me to dinner and said, “I’m serving that favorite family recipe—Costco Chicken Pot Pie!”

I learned to be a bad cook from my mom, who was a school teacher and not much interested in cooking when she came home. I remember Mom’s weekly menu was as follows:  Sunday, pot roast; Monday, leftovers; Tuesday, stew or soup made with the rest of the leftovers; Wednesday, spaghetti casserole; Thursday, leftover casserole; Friday clean out the fridge of whatever is left from the week, Saturday hamburgers. For lunches we would often have Velveeta cheese toast, broiled. Usually, Mom forgot to take the toast out in time and the soft cheese would form a blackened crust that we would peel off before eating the toast. I actually have fond memories of this!

So I am not much of a cook. However, I do have a big recipe binder bulging with magazine clippings, handouts from Relief Society cooking classes, and printed instructions from Allrecipes.com. Almost every day I heave it down from the upper cabinet and browse through to find something to make. Lately, that has been hard, though, since the binding has broken and all the papers tend to fall out when I pull it down.

So the other day I cleaned it out. I bought a bright new notebook, a package of shiny clean page protectors, and some colorful write-on dividers. Spreading open the old binder mess, I commenced to sorting. A slightly rancid smell wafted out—a smell of countless spills of countless meals left to cure in the sticky pages.

I forced myself to use Marie Kondo’s “Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” method. I wanted to keep only the recipes that truly brought me joy. So I tossed magazine and newspaper clippings I had never actually used—recipes that were clipped with the dream that I too could prepare that beautiful, exotic, and/or healthy dish pictured so alluring in the pages of Family Circle or the Daily Herald. Gone were Orecchiette with Roasted Butternut Squash, Grilled Pork and Veggie Salad, Freezer Spaghetti Squash, and Original Plum Torte. I also tossed about 50 recipes for zucchini, acquired in my never-ending quest to find a way to serve it that my family actually enjoys, including Zucchini Oat Dark Chocolate Chip Cookies, Zucchini Oven Fries, and Cinnamon Zucchini Pancakes.  None of these recipes had ever actually been prepared in my kitchen.

I also tossed some recipes that I used to make, but didn’t anymore, as well as some copies of well-loved recipes that I found I had included two or three copies of in my binder.

But I kept the favorites—the ones that I make regularly and that bring me and my family joy. My sister Patty’s Chicken Tortilla Casserole, a pork chop recipe I found in the last year that is really good and juicy, instructions on grilling steak so it is just right, Anna’s Butternut Squash and Hazelnut Lasagna, my trusty Taco Soup, Butternut Squash Soup, California Chipotle Salad, Raw Spring Rolls with Asian Sauce, and my mother’s Cheesy Potatoes.

These favorite recipes evoke strong memories. Take the Chicken Tortilla Casserole, for example. When I look at that recipe I see my sister Patty (who IS a very good cook) sitting on my hand-me-down couch in the rented house Paul and I lived in early in our marriage. I had asked her for some good company recipes and given her some cards and a pen. She was smiling as she wrote the recipe from memory and telling me about the times she had served it. She got to the end of the layering instructions and wrote e-e-e-nd with cheese. She laughed at the extra e’s she had written by mistake but said, “That will remind you to use lots of cheese!”  I also see Patty serving that casserole on Christmas Day when we visited her, and my mom and dad (now long gone) dishing up hefty servings along with Patty’s great corn sticks (which I never did learn to make). I see my friends gathered for our annual Christmas lunch and insisting that I have to make this recipe every year or it wouldn’t be Christmas.

Some recipe memories are more recent. Just a few years ago we had a ward cooking class and a neighbor taught us to make Raw Spring Rolls, with a shredded cabbage filling and a ground almond sauce. I’m not a big fan of raw food diets, and, looking at the ingredients, the dish does not look good, but put them together and it is miraculous. When I look at the recipe, I see my good neighbor, I see the time I brought the Spring Rolls to a work party and everyone raved, I see my daughter-in-law begging for them when she was pregnant.

Anna’s Butternut Squash and Hazelnut Lasagna is a demanding recipe and I have only made it once. But I keep it because of the time my daughter Anna and her husband made it for me, and because it was served warm and delicious and filled with the loving effort they put into it. I keep it because I grow butternut squash in my garden and I have dreams that I can serve that dish to my friends and family and they will feel the same love.

So really, this big red binder is really filled with memories. Each page is more than a recipe—it is friendship, it is family, it is love.

I recently read a talk given by Kevin B. Worthen, president of Brigham Young University. In it he discusses the vital importance of nurturing our relationships with others, saying “no one can flourish in isolation and that the quality of our relationships with others will ultimately determine our level of fulfillment and happiness in both this mortal existence and the life to come. It is in this sense that it is not good for man—or woman—to be alone” (https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/kevin-j-worthen_it-is-not-good-that-man-should-be-alone/). In our culture, much of the nurturing of relationships comes as we eat together—from the first time we suckle at our mother’s breast to the meals we share as  family to the pizza eaten on dates. The recipes we save and cherish symbolize the efforts we make to build deep and loving bonds with others.

And because of this, I fully expect that within a few months my new clean binder will once again be stuffed and overflowing with clippings and printouts and dreams of new ways to nurture my friends and family. And that, my friends,  is a good thing.