Breaking Cat News by Georgia Dunn for March 10, 2025

I still have my grandmother’s chicken biscuit recipe. She also loved crafts and made it into a plaque several years before her death. It’s hanging in my kitchen.

Love Letters to the heart in my stomach! Sadly, my Granny didn’t write ANYTHING down. LOL But I have managed to recreate many of her best recipes. Mostly through trial and error.

A lot of my recipes are from my brother (who was a gourmet cook) as well as my mother. My mother actually didn’t cook that much.

I cannot recommend a cookbook more highly than “What’s Cooking in Kentucky”, by Irene Hayes. There is plenty of room at the back to write in your other favorites too!

I love that I can now stay up long enough to see the comic when it first posts.

I wonder if we are going to get some recipes this week! Wouldn’t that be fun?

What a lovely way to look at it!

When a close friend of mine passed away many years ago, I’d celebrate her birthday by making her favorite pesto. It was Marcella Hazan’s version, which got the ‘full Genoese treatment’, meaning the pasta had a generous handful of greens beans and new potatoes tossed in. Since her birthday was in early September, I often made a fresh peach cobbler, too.

The only recipes from my maternal grandmother that were written down were for her fruitcake and her ice box cookies. The fruitcake recipe was too long and complicated with too many ingredients to fit onto a recipe card let alone just remember. Many of Grandma’s recipes were taught to me by my mother as I helped her to make them.

My dad remembered his mom’s ingredients for pioneer salad dressing but not the amounts. Mom kept experimenting until Dad thought she had it just about right.

I have my great-grandmother’s recipes from when she married in 1894!

Now I wonder if any of the recipes are for gourmet cat food.

We had eight kids, so most of what my mother made was pretty basic. Nothing that really required a written recipe handed down. Possibly the most unusual thing she made was tacos. Her filling had ground beef, tomatoes, beans, and corn cooked with chili powder until thick. Soft corn tortillas were heated in the cast iron skillet and we had cheese and lettuce.

Oh, are the gang going to try recipes from the 1970’s? They’re in for a shock…

No Dee Dee no. Do not push that button!

Recipe? Who want recipe? Me can no eat recipe. Gimme foods!

I still have my St. John’s Lutheran Church cookbook that Mom gave me. She had her own copy. Some of her best recipes came from there. (That was her church as a child.)

OT temporary absence

I have my mom’s cookbook she made for us. She was one of those cooks that just threw ingredients in the bowl without measuring. She had to reverse measuring the ingredients to come up with a recipe. Miss her dearly.

slightly OT: YouTube. Tasting History with Max Miller. Superb and informative and FUN!

A few years after getting married, we “adopted” one of my (college) student workers. She was vegetarian and the college’s idea of vegetarian was pasta. We weren’t (and aren’t) vegetarians, but we do know how to cook good food. We’d invite her over for dinner and then send her back with leftovers (she eventually learned it was okay to bring some plastic containers on her own). When she graduated (she ended up living with us for a summer because she needed housing to finish her degree. Our house had a college student (her) and a newborn (ours) – that was fun) I made her a three-ring binder of all the foods we’d served her. She had it for a long time (we’d hear how she was still using it. That exercise prompted me to type up (on the computer) all the recipes we use regularly. It even has a table of contents (of sorts). Although the long ago new born (and the later arrival) complain that some things show up in multiple places and other things showed up after the ToC was done. I am in the process of updating it (with a better ToC – computers/word processors have come a long way!) I think, though, it’s going to be at least 2 volumes.

I hope I can still find my father’s recipe for New Mexican chili. I wish I had learned how to make his famous BBQ, especially the brisket. Everything falling off the bone! I must ask my mom for her lasagna recipe and her pumpkin roll recipe. ♥️

When my mother in law passed last fall my husband’s cousin asked for a handwritten recipe, didn’t matter what it was for, she just wanted one. She and MIL had exchanged recipes for years. We never located the recipe card box, but hubby did find a few tucked in different spots in the kitchen. I put them in the mail to her last week.

I have my grandma’s pie crust recipe. Take lard. Add enough hot water to melt it. Add enough flour to stick together. That’s it! Don’t know of much else that was written down.

Even if you have something written down, you still can’t get the same remembered result in some cases.

If you ever have to evacuate quickly because a wildfire is bearing down on you grab the recipes. You’ll miss them most if you don’t.

Okay. I’m all ears! Let’s do this.

Mom never wrote down recipes, even her perfect stuffing recipe. When her recollection faded, the recipes were lost. All I have is the memory.

Meanwhile, Back on the Nile

At the oPyramid Library (Formerly the You Call That a Pyramid)

Beatrixia: Thanks for helping me organize the 641.5 section, Obie.

Obadiah Opossum: Glad to do it. I know you’ve had a lot to do ever since we found those scrolls from the Library at Meowlexandria.

Bea: Sue Chef and Violet-Ifa have agreed to help. And I’ve sent a letter to Afar to Beaver Lee Cleary.

Violet-Ifa: Here we are!

Sue Chef: And we have a special guest.

Bea: Beaver Lee Cleary! I didn’t expect you for days yet, Bev!

Bev: As you say, Why wait until the last minute?

Sue Chef: Let’s start here with Betty Crocodile’s Recipes for Kids.

Bea: Sounds like a plan!

“A meal shared with a loved one across time” Is such a sweet sentiment!

Man I had to beg my mother for family recipes. Then again, we never had that many.

My mom was an excellent cook. Never ever used a written recipe. Fortunately taught the best ones to us at a young age. Thanks Mom!

Recipes are a great way to reach through time! I never met my great-grandmother, but I can connect to her through the recipes my mother still cooks.

Mom was a great recipe cook. Hubs is a great cook but never uses recipes. Unfortunately, he often can’t repeat the perfect dish because he doesn’t remember exactly what he put in it!

I have both my grandmothers’ cookbooks.

Love some old recipes.

Use a 5¢ can of…

I have a box of recipes from my mom along with her Betty Crocker cookbook – and I’m glad I have those. She passed away 7 years ago (yesterday was the day). I also have hand-written recipes from my maternal grandmother AND from her mother (my great-grandmother). I want to take those and get them entered into an electronic document so we don’t lose them, but scanning them isn’t working because the ink has faded and the cards themselves are discolored. But I can still read them, so that is part of my “vacation” plans for this year.

What a lovely idea!

Never wrote down my mom or dad’s recipes, I would just watch and try to copy them. My favorite thing was my mom’s southern (carolina)biscuits. When I was old enough to cook, my first attempt to make them, would best be described by my dad as, Floor breakers! It literally took me 10 years before I got it right! When my mom and dad tried it, dad ate them, while nodding his head in approval! Mom smiled after the first bite, and said very good! I was so proud of myself, I had tears, in my eyes!

How wonderful!

I am going to love this week!

I was cleaning out a shed, getting ready to move. Found a recipe for my MIL’s Persimmon cookies randomly sitting on a shelf. The shed has been cleaned and reorganized several times since she passed in 2017

I have almost no recipes from my grandmothers. At my Grandma’s funeral, the rabbi asked me what she was like as a grandmother, did we bake cookies together? Through my tears, I blurted out “Grandma didn’t cook — she catered!”

In the midst of the recipe arc, I wonder who ties Puck’s tie so well.

My mom was a decent cook, but she HATED to cook. Her mom was one of those old-school “dump cooks” who baked from scratch without using recipes, but mom never got the hang of that. She never cooked anything without a recipe!

I hope the woman’s grandmother has more legible handwriting than mine did. And yes, I can read and write cursive, the trouble is I am not sure she entirely knew how to write cursive.

One summer, my dear first cousin asked all family members to contribute a few favorite recipes so she could compile them in a family cookbook. She got over 100 contributions from ooey-gooey desserts to vegan stews. She got them printed up and bound and gave them to everyone for Christmas. A real treasure! Especially because some people included little stories about the recipes.

If you have such a treasure, make digital copies of it to share with loved ones. As the owner of the family home place, I’m the keeper of the old pictures, etc. I digitalized everything and shared them with the siblings and their kids. I also did a genealogy. I’ve never had kids but the information will live on for the next generation.

This is why we were all upset when Aunt Myrtle destroyed all of Mama’s recipes (her mother) after she died. She kept the ones her son liked, but threw away all of the others, even though Mama had four other grandchildren! (She had two biological grandchildren, but she and Papa both would tell anyone who would listen that my sisters and I were theirs, also.) When my cousin asked her about anything, she would either swear that the recipe she kept was the only one (it never was) or try to tell her that Mama never made anything like that! Mama made the comment once that she had five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, which meant she had anywhere from five to ten different ways to make any recipe you needed, since everyone had different preferences. The only recipe I have that I know is the one she made is for her chocolate pecan pie – and I had to call her the first time I made it to figure out what I had done “wrong.” Turned out she “forgot” to write down her secret ingredient, and she found it really funny that I didn’t already know what it was.

I have our family cook book. The recipe for pfeffernüse cookies dates back a couple hundred years, and instead of shortening or butter calls for goose fat! I never seem to find it at my local grocery store.

BCN gains weight …