I have a shelf full of cookbooks. I bet you do too. How often do you go to them and look for recipes? I mean I bought them or received them from someone special, so you would think that I would go to them often looking for suggestions of meals to make. Sadly, I do not.
Actually, what I do when I am looking for something to make is go to Pinterest. Isn’t that what we all do these days? Haven’t most of our cookbooks gone out of vogue?
I was spring cleaning my kitchen…I am getting this done very slowly…when I started cleaning my cabinet that holds my cookbooks. I had suggested to my daughters last summer that they should use these cookbooks when it was their turn to cook. When they are home for the summer, I have them take a turn cooking a meal every week. It gives them a chance to practice their cooking skills, and I get a break from cooking. That thought of having them use those cookbooks didn’t go over all that well. They turned to Pinterest, naturally.
I decided as I was cleaning this cabinet, that I would use these cookbooks and make one recipe from one of these books every week. It would add to my collection of favorites and put these books to good use rather than just something I need to clean every year.
We were having company for supper, so I decided to try it out on them. As my first cookbook, I picked one that had been by Grandma’s. I knew there had to be something good in there. My Grandma always got these Taste of Home magazine and then bought the cookbook every year.
I tried a salad, main course, and dessert from the cookbook. The beauty of it all was that I already had many of the ingredients, which is why I chose these particular recipes. I made Sunshine Citrus Salad, Crispy Garlic Chicken, and Apple Puff Pastry.
I told my guests what I was doing, so they knew ahead of time that they were guinea pigs. When I was making the dessert, my husband thought it looked tolerable. (Pictured salad, chicken, dessert)
Once everyone was done tasting my “new” recipes, they all loved them. Best of all, my husband loved the dessert and said it tasted so much better than he anticipated it would.
So my suggestion for you is to try it. Get out those old recipe books and try to make something new for your family. They may enjoy it.
Maybe it is a new skill that you have always wanted to try your hand at – why don’t you try it? It is better to have tried and failed than to have always wondered if you could do it. It is also better to try something new, and realize you don’t like it. You might actually surprise yourself and realize that you can succeed in whatever your new venture is and you may really like it.
Pulling out old recipe books and making a new recipe is an easy thing to try. Sometimes it takes trying and succeeding at smaller little things to build our confidence up for the bigger things we want to try.
What is holding you back? Go ahead. Pull out that cookbook and try a new recipe, you may just enjoy it and be able to add something new into your menagerie of meals you cook for your family.
Something like this may also be a stepping stone for something a little bit bigger and better that you have always wanted to try.
