The Family Recipe Binder

I tackled a project today that I have been putting off for a very long time. If you watched my Instagram stories you saw the mess I had in front of me. My collection of recipes, a complete disaster, all shoved into a 1/2″ binder. About 10 years ago I created this binder, and started to fill it’s sheet protectors with my favorite tried and true recipes. Somewhere along the way, things got busy, I got lazy, or a combo of the two, and I just started placing loose recipes into the binder. I had good intentions of filing them correctly, but never got around to it.
When I pulled out the binder today to find my favorite Thanksgving recipes, I told myself ENOUGH is enough. And I took on the task of organizing. I am in love with how it turned out. Completely clean and clutter free. And just like I say with any other mess in my house, now that it’s clean, this is how it’s going to STAY. NO going back to how it was. (Easier said than done sometimes…)

I wanted to share with you just how special this binder is to me. It may look like just a binder to you. But to me, it’s filled with a lifetime of memories.
I’ll start from the beginning. I love to cook and bake. Some of my favorite memories growing up were made in the kitchen with my family. My Grandma Wetz’s kitchen especially. When John and I first got married, I knew it was time to start organizing my recipes for my own kitchen and family, but wasn’t sure where to start. I looked at those little boxes that you had to write on each index card. I looked at scrapbooks that were so cute and organized, every page identical and tidy. I am a very matchy matchy person so I was drawn to the idea of neat, tidy, and perfectly matching. I started out with the pre-organized scrapbook route, and started writing down my recipes in it.
About a year later though, something inside of me just wasn’t settled. Everytime I went over to my grandma’s house to cook, bake, or have a canning day, I would look at her pull out her books and papers, magazine clippings with stains on them, handwritten notes about what she changed or liked about the recipe, and I wanted them. I wanted all of them. I told my Grandma I wanted to start making copies of her recipes, exactly like they were so that I could have them one day when she wasn’t here anymore.
We sat at her copy machine one day and copied ALL of my favorites. Chicken & Dumplings, our Thanksgiving Jalapeno Corn Bread Dressing, Oatmeal Cookies, Dill Pickles, Chocolate Cake, Cheese Potatoes… The list went on, and I knew that I would hold on to these recipes for many years. I had NO idea I would lose her just a few short months later. She passed away suddenly and tragically to a brain aneurysm, and it was the hardest loss that I have experienced in my life. She passed away on Thanksgiving day, November 24, 2011. The pain comes and goes, while it certainly is easier today than it was 8 years ago, it still stings. Pulling out the recipe book year after year, on a holiday that I ALWAYS spent cooking with her, is hard. Cooking for a holiday that we lost her on, is hard.
But I continue to cook, I continue to teach my kid’s how to make her recipes, and I think of her fondly and lovingly. I look at her recipes, and think about her typing them on her computer, emailing my sister, my cousin, and I. And always loving us with everything she had in her. I look at the recipes and remember all the years she would pull out her hand sewn aprons, and we would bake dozens of Christmas cookies together. I look at the recipes and see the time that she taught me how to can pickles, and they turned out so awful we had to throw them all out. I look at the recipes and see the time that we were making a tuna salad and thought we could boil an egg in the microwave and it blew up. (The egg not the microwave, but might as well have sounded like the whole micro exploded.) I look at the recipes and see breakfasts from the morning after a sleepover Saturday morning, with eggs, bacon, and homemade biscuits with honey. And remember feeling surprised when I found out Grandma & Grandpa didn’t eat like that every single morning. She was an amazing, beautiful woman, and I owe SO much of who I am to her.
So now, even though I’m crying writing this out, I am very happy to have this binder organized again. I have recipes that are 20 years old, 80 years old, and some that are added by myself within the past 10 years. I love Pinterest for finding and pinning recipes, but I make a point to print them out, write on them, and save them in my binder. I hope to pass on my book of recipes to my kids one day, and hopefully they can pass on to their children after.

I have learned that when someone is gone, we don’t miss the perfect, tidy moments. We miss the memories. The love. The sometimes messes and the laughter. We miss the irreplaceable experiences we had with that person. No amount of picture perfect curating can replace those experiences. But maybe, we can hold onto those memories just a little bit, by saving the messy, holding onto the not so tidy, and cherishing the imperfectly perfect.