{ A day spent fighting allergies and looking through cookbooks }

 

Could we all just take a moment to welcome in Fall?  With big wide open arms.

Although, apparently Fall in Texas is slightly confused with summer.  Just ask the 100 degree temperature we're feeling.  Sometimes I want to go outside, and just yell out "ENOUGH!".  

 

But I doubt that would do anything, other than bring in some unwarranted attention from neighbors

 

 

The allergies have been at their worst.  Of course!  I'm sure it is because the other day I said to Curt, that I was doing so well and hadn't had allergy attacks in a while.  Sometimes I wonder why I open my mouth, I should already know that whatever I say, is going to come back to bite me in the behind.

I'm not the only one though, everyone in our area is suffering with them.  

But for me, they get so bad, that nothing seems to help, aside from taking a pink little Benadryl pill.  It knocks me out within 20 minutes, and therefore gives me some reprieve.  Problem is, it also makes me quite groggy for a couple of hours, and I don't like that feeling at all.

So today, was pretty much a useless day.  I got nothing done, other than nod off constantly, wake up feeling groggy, walk around and get some daily household chores done, and just look through some of my cookbooks.

 

So that's what I leave you with, just some quick shots of the cookbooks I was looking through.  Hope you enjoy.

As for me, I'm headed back to my bed.  I can't wait for this groggy feeling to subside. 

{ First foggy morning of the year.. }

Do you know the old folklore quote “For every foggy morning in August, it will snow that many days this winter.”?

 

Is it true, does it actually work, do you trust it?

 

I have heard of it but honestly, I've never really given it much thought.  But seeing the dense fog this morning, made me think of it, and then my friend Jo on Instagram mentioned it too.  Whether it actually works or not, we will have to wait and see, but I love snow, so I'm all for it.

 

 

Woke up this morning to some dense fog, cloudy skies, and 60 degrees.  It even smelled like Fall outside.  

I opened my windows, let the fresh air in and totally indulged in this beautiful cool morning.  It may be pretty early for Fall to roll around, but days like these always remind me of what we have in store.

 

Stepping outside, I noticed the dew drops on the grass and plants.  You could feel the humidity in the air, my hair certainly reacted, and if you're a woman, you know exactly what I mean about that.  

But just the one night of rain we got on Wednesday, and this drop in temperature, has helped our garden and vegetation, tremendously.  The plants are all standing up tall, they're greener, sturdier, happier.

The grass is no longer completely dry yellow blades, but turning greener.  It's been a tough two months, weather wise.

I shifted some things around, made the living area cozier, all in anticipation for cooler weather.  Again, I say, I know it's early, we're halfway through August, but can you tell how desperate I am for cooler days?

I can't wait to sit right there on that couch, with that big crochet blanket, candles lit around me, a cup of hot coffee and a period drama on the tv. 

After giving the house a quick run through, and having some toast for breakfast, I headed out to get my Walmart grocery pickup.

Funny story, they changed the pickup area from one side of the store to the other, and I had no clue.  They did this in the past two weeks, after my last pickup day.  So, I drove up, wondered why there were no numbers for the parking spots, and why the usual side door, was now closed and titled "Emergency Exit".

I may or may not have sat there for a minute wondering just what in the world?  Then drove around looking for the new pickup spot.  I found it, and had to chuckle as I saw other vehicles doing the same thing I did.  At least Walmart keeps us on our toes.

I returned home with the groceries, and then started the process of putting it all away.  I usually give my fridge a good clean on grocery day, so that I can pack everything into a clean and sparkly fridge.

There's such a wonderful sense of joy when you see a full fridge, especially when it's packed with fruits and veggies, milk and eggs.  I don't know why in my mind, that is what I picture as the ultimate food filled refrigerator.

Yesterday, I went through my cookbooks again.  Remember I mentioned the other day, that I had a pile or two of cookbooks to figure out where to put?

Well I found a spot for them on my bookshelf, and then while putting them away, spent some time going through a few.  I tend to forget what jewels I have hidden in there.  I am particularly drawn to old church cookbooks, as they (in my humble opinion), seem to contain the most delicious recipes.

One of the recipes I came across, was for a Slow Cooked Southern Macaroni and Cheese.  Being that mc and cheese is one of my kid's favorites, I decided to make it for lunch today.  The one thing that I wasn't expecting to put in it, was eggs.  

 

I have never used eggs in my macaroni and cheese, but the addition makes for a much creamier and thicker result.

One thing I didn't use was the Velveeta Cheese, because it's not something I keep on hand, and it's not something my family enjoys, aside from the fact that Jasmine can't have any kind of yellow cheese due to her lactose intolerance.  So I left it out, and even then, it is still delicious.  I will share the recipe tomorrow, on the food blog.

For dinner tonight we are doing Dominos pizza.  They are doing a special when ordering online, until Sunday, you get 50% off all pizzas.  We also have a free pizza available, so that will be yummy.

And that is basically it.  That was my Friday.  We are expecting rain starting tomorrow and lasting all week through until next weekend, so I'm quite looking forward to rainy days at home.

Have a wonderful Friday night, enjoy your weekend, and if I don't get around to posting, I will be here Monday morning for our Happy Homemaker Monday!

{ New cookbooks and the usual pottering around - Blogtober 2018 }

3

My mornings tend to start in the same fashion, well at least the past few months.  I get up at 6am, make Curt's coffee and lunch, and then see him off to work.

Marley and I will then head back to the bedroom and climb back into bed.  I don't sleep, I just pop on the telly and catch up on some Youtube vlogs for about an hour or so.

But just that hour of quiet, the house still fast asleep, the sun just starting to rise and the day slowly coming to live, does wonders for my soul.  It really helps set the pace for the rest of the day.

{ Cookbooks by Addie Gundry }

Hey everyone, I wanted to sit with you all for a bit, and talk about cookbooks.

If you've followed me at any time throughout my blogging journey, over the past 12 years, you'll know that I am obsessed with cookbooks.

I have a huge collection and just can't seem to get enough.

I especially love collections, or series from the same author, and so I've been extremely blessed and lucky, to have received pretty much all of Addie Gundry's cookbooks.

In a previous post, I shared the first two cookbooks that I had received, but since then, I've had another 6 come in, and even though I am only now talking about them, trust me, I've cooked many recipes from the books, and I've even shared them with my sister in law.  They are amazing, easy, filled with beautiful photography, and full of recipes that are made using ingredients from your pantry.

As a busy mom, I love cooking and often find myself in a rut, so I'm constantly looking for new recipes to try, but I want something that is not only delicious, cheap to make and uses easily available ingredients.

Addie Gundry has yet to disappoint me. 

{ Cookbooks and Recipe Binders....Use them }

Over my many years of marriage, I've collected dozens of cookbooks.  Some I got rid of over the years, but most I have kept.  I just can't help it, I have a problem when it comes to cookbooks, they seem to jump into my shopping basket when I walk by and I can't just put them back.

Well maybe it doesn't go down exactly like that, but that's what I tell myself to feel better about the fact that I'm absolutely besotted with cookbooks.  I'm also kind of shallow because I need them to be pretty and have adorable covers, oh and they HAVE to be filled with photographs of what I'm supposed to be cooking cause I need to know what I'm shooting for.

Now, granted, I do have a few with no pictures, well, actually quite a lot with no pictures, so maybe I'm not that big of a snob as I thought I was.  Let's just say that if I have my choice, I prefer pictures, lots of them, preferably one for every recipe.  There!!!

Here's my problem though.....much as I love the cookbooks, a lot of time they tend to be forgotten, just sitting there all sad on the shelf.

If I had to think of the moment that I stopped oohing and aahing over them, I will say that it was when Pinterest and food blogs came about.  I mean, all of a sudden I had the cooking world at my fingertips and with just a few clicks of the keyboard I was slammed with tons of recipes to try.

But I've also found that the more I look online, the less I find what I want.  And maybe I really am a bit of a snob when it comes to cookbooks, because I still find that the best homemade dishes come from the old cookbooks.  Some of the newest recipes seem a bit too froo froo for me.  Just sayin'!!!!

Since I'm all about using what you have and getting back into the hang of things, I thought, why not fall back in love with all my old cookbooks.

So I've given myself the challenge of cooking at least 2 or 3 recipes from the cookbooks, every meal plan that I make. 

I had already made the menu plan for the next two weeks, so I'm going to look through it once more and I'm going to switch out 2 or 3 recipes.  I'm quite excited to do this because I have such good cookbooks, some with inexpensive trusted recipes that I know we will enjoy.

These small cookbooks are one of my treasures from my collection.  You know how big of an Anglophile I am, so I've collected these for a few years.  They are the perfect combination of recipe with a little history behind them, like the one below for Richmond Maids of Honour, which are small tartlets from the time of King Henry VIII.

I can't wait to try these.

So, challenge set for myself and I'm going to see how I do.  I might even do a weekly feature of the cookbook recipe I tried that week, which cookbook, if I liked it or not etc.  What do you think?

And feel free to join me, pick up your cookbooks, look through them, cook from them and let us know how it goes.  I think we'll all be surprised at the yummy recipes we have laying around, and most of them pretty inexpensive too.

Something else I'm working on, is improving my written, printed and cut out recipes.  I've collected quite a few over the years and right now they're all sitting in this folder.  It works ok, but I want something easier, so I grabbed those colored folders which I had sitting around from one of the school years.

I'm going to print out a cover for them, make each one into a specific category and start organizing my recipes.

I was quite surprised to find some of my favorite recipes hidden in that recipe folder.

These are recipes I cut out from Taste of Home magazines, when my Jasmine was about 2 years old, so 16 years ago.  Some are so good, I remember the Chicken Stroganoff, Parmesan Chicken and the Swedish Meatballs.  Brings back some great memories :)

I even have recipes that my great grandma cut out for me, and some handwritten by my grandmother.  For now they're just around, laying here and there so I need to get them put up somewhere safe where I can get to them when I need but also preserving them.  It would be quite sad if I lost those mementos.

Well ladies,  I started this post earlier in the day and then had to stop to help kids with school and do some laundry, it's now just after 5pm and I really need to get dinner started.

Have a wonderful blessed evening :)

Cookbook versus Online Recipes......fave?

Good morning friends, come on in and sit with me a bit, I want to chat with you about cookbooks and recipes and all that yummy stuff.

One of the questions I am most asked, is about menu planning and the recipes I cook.  Though I've written a few blog posts about this very subject in the past, I am still asked to this day about it, and I don't mind one single bit because I do love everything to do with cooking.

If you want to read up on my menu planning and how I go about doing that, you can check out these posts:

I want to Menu Plan, but I don't know how
Today flew by and Menu Planning
Recipes and Grocery Lists

I have always mentioned menu planning and cookbooks throughout my blog, in some post or another, but those are the 3 that I can think off the top of my head, that are specifically related to this very subject.

If you've known me for a while then you know that I collect cookbooks and have this great affinity for them.  Matter of fact, I've had friends and blog readers mail me cookbooks over the years because they were getting rid of them and knew that they would be in good hands.  I do thank you for that, they are safely stashed in my huge collection of cookbooks.

So here comes the question.

 Cookbooks versus Online Recipes, which is my favorite?

I guess I'm an old fashioned kind of girl because no matter how technologically advanced we may be in this day and age, and I do have my very own food blog online too, nothing beats the feel of an actual cookbook in my hand.

I'm in no way dissing online recipes because I do use them too, but 99% of my food is either cooked from memory of meals prepared growing up, or they come from my trusty cookbooks.

I don't have all of them out, still have a few bags and boxes in the garage, because I just don't have the room for all of them.  My dream would be to one day own my own house, and have a huge library in the kitchen for all the cookbooks I have collected or been gifted over the years.  Now that would be something I would absolutely love.

So why do I prefer cookbooks?

Here are a couple reasons that personally make me prefer actual books to online.

1 - I don't always like having my laptop around when I'm cooking. Let me start by telling you that I'm not a messy cook, I clean up as I go and try very hard not to mess everywhere, especially with my laptop and camera nearby, but there are still times that accidents happen, and I don't much care for that.

2 - Old cookbooks have a tremendous meaning to me, I like to think that I'm connecting with these women from eras gone by, through the pages of the book. Not to say that I don't like new books, but the old ones are much more special to me. Flipping though the old and tattered pages, learning about the ways they used to cook, the ingredients they had at hand and what they made with them, is a history lesson in and of itself.

3 - I love collecting cookbooks from garage sales and thrift stores, they often come with scribbles in the corner, or highlighted recipes.

4 - There is nothing I love more than to menu plan, with a cup of coffee or tea and a stack of cookbooks next to me. It's exciting to read through these and try to find something that my family would enjoy.

5 - I love step by steps and books that show me the simple act of deboning and cleaning a chicken, or fish, or how to roll out pie dough. Yes I know that many online sources can do the same with photos, but I still will always pick an old cookbook over a picture on the internet.

6 - I like to read cookbooks like I would read a fiction book. Curling up on the couch with one in my hand is much more comfortable than dragging my laptop around, just saying.

Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike online sources, as I stated above, I myself have a food blog. But when looking for recipes, I still prefer to browse the books on my shelf than go to Google.

One of the things that make a cookbook for me, are the introductions and the stories that often come with the recipes. It's not just a recipe book, it's filled with information and teachings and pictures, it's almost like I'm going to school and learning a new subject through it's pages.

Then there's the smell of the pages. I've often said that even when it comes to an actual book and an ebook read on my Kindle, I still prefer the book, maybe it's because I have this habit of opening it up for the first time and sniffing the pages. Crazy? Maybe, but I love doing that.

There is also the fact that I love original recipes, and by original I mean that I like the recipe to be as close to the original as possible, and when I do try out a new one, I don't change anything unless I am really out of an ingredient and have to substitute. But for that reason alone, I make sure to buy everything I need for that specific recipe before I make it.

Online recipes are great, I have found some amazing ones out there, but one thing that has always bugged me is that they get linked from one site to another and another, and every time they get posted something has been changed. Whoever is posting the recipe has decided to adapt it to their liking, or changed up ingredients here and there, which to me no longer represents the actual recipe.

I once found a recipe I wanted to try, and as I often do, I track it back to it's original blog or website, just because I do know that it's often been changed.  This particular recipe, I kept tracking back and back as the links provided and it went from blog to blog to blog, and by the time I made it to the original site, the recipe was NOTHING like I had seen it posted.  So much had been changed and omitted and substituted that it ended up almost being a completely different meal.  

But anyway, this is just my personal opinion, obviously, and this in no way means that I don't myself experiment with changing something here or there, but I don't make a habit of it, I prefer to try it in it's original form.

Lastly, one of the reasons I prefer books to online is because in my own journey to simplify my life and to try and break away from everything that is so technical and cyber, I prefer to hold on to the simple things even if those things are in the form of a handed down cookbook.

Everything else in my life is ran by the internet, we depend so much on being online and the web and googling and texting and all that stuff, that I fear that we are losing our sense of individuality and personality.  It's almost like a big collective run by one mind named Internet.

If you've ever watched Star Trek, you know exactly who the Borg were, right?  If not, look it up and you'll understand what I'm saying.  LOL

So I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on this subject, do you prefer cookbooks or online recipes?

Old Cookbooks

I have been collecting cookbooks for many years, little ones, big ones, new ones and old ones, printed recipes and handwritten ones.

I only wish I had a huge kitchen with tons of shelves to house all my books, but this small area in the pantry will have to do.

So I'm sitting down to work on the menu plan for the next two weeks.

it has to be one of my favorite things to do, because I love nothing more than to pull out my cookbooks and to sift through them, page at a page, finding treasures hidden, certain recipes highlighted and little hand written notes on the side.



I have quite a few that focus on chuckwagon cooking and I'm always impressed by what they could do with such little at hand, makes me want to go back in time and try it for myself.

This next one is one of my favorites, I have such an affinity for old cookbooks, they take us back to a simpler time where people didn't really do gourmet anything, and that right there is my favorite way of cooking.....



Reader's Digest Secrets of Better Cooking was first published in 1973.  For me, the best part of this cookbook is not only the recipes but the information included.




Secrets of Better Cooking is designed to help you make nutritious and exciting meals a regular part of our family's life style without breaking your budget.

For the beginner, Secrets of Better Cooking is a complete book of kitchen knowledge that can make cooking easier and less expensive.

And that is all it takes to get me hooked, honestly, I don't need or like fancy schmancy stuff, give me a good old cookbook any day.



Want to know how to de-bone a chicken?  No problem, this book includes step by step with pictures.  I'm a huge visual person and more often than not the pictures or lack of in a book either makes it or breaks it for me.



But I also am a self proclaimed Anglophile, and therefore I couldn't let these pass by.  I found them on Amazon a few years ago and recently, about two or so months ago, my friend Alicia who is stationed in England, sent me another one :)

Favourite Herefordshire and Wye valley, Scottish Teatime, Favourite Isle of Wight, Favourite Irish, Favourite Lancashire, Scottish Country, Favourite Country, English Teatime and Welsh Teatime recipes....you can find them on Amazon still, I believe.



And then there's the cookbooks with the ring binders, the ones that you find at church sales and museums. 

While visiting Oklahoma a few years ago, I picked up Salvation Army Women's Auxiliary - Heirloom Recipes and Memories and this one is chock full of not only amazing recipes but stories to match, kitchen tips and even ideas for parties, menus etc.



Mmmm Moist Pineapple Cake



Finally, here's one of the older ones I have, this one published in 1968 and it's a compilation of recipes from Elementary School parents.  Oh boy is this one full of goodness.



I am ever so gentle when handling this one because as you can see it's getting really old, the cover is falling apart and tearing and the pages themselves have yellowed with age and feel super thin, like they can easily disintegrate.



This one of the books I'll be using today for menu planning.  Again, because it's chock full of great delicious recipes that don't require anything out of this world, most of the ingredients are in the pantry.



Some of the ingredients have changed over the years, some may no longer be available, while others have gotten a make over and that for me is the challenge, to find a recipe that I really want to try but figuring out what I can substitute for this or that.



So, next time you're menu planning, don't just go to the internet, remember that you may have a bunch of wonderful cookbooks on your shelves just waiting to be used.

Don't be afraid to go back in time, don't be afraid to try something new, put those cookbooks to good use, it is after all what you collect them for right?

Though I have to say that my advice above goes for you all as much as it does for me because with the technology nowadays, I find myself too often reaching for the internet for menu planning instead of the treasures that I already have filling up shelves in the pantry.

I'm off to Menu Plan, and read, and learn, can hardly wait :)