Family Mellmann

So it begins.  Almost eighteen years ago I was taking pictures of firsts; first smile, first tooth, first crawls, first steps.  Now it's pictures of lasts. Tonight we had the first soccer game of the season - Patrick's last first game of high school soccer.  It was a tough game against a new competitor and we lost hard (7-0), but we had a chance to play many of our young players who benefited from the field time against a larger (it was their varsity team, so all juniors and seniors versus our 7th-12th grade players) and more experienced team. Here are a few shots of Patrick.   Hammin' it up for the camera.   You can't tell from this shot, but this was a lovely save. While we did lose the game, Patrick made more saves than he let through.

Tonight's dinner is an all hands on deck meal, and a family favorite.   Shrimp and vegetable skewers! 

Back in December Katherine refused to get on the stage and play for her recital. She disappeared into the bathroom and wouldn't come out. In January she turned around and played at the local mall, so it's hard to tell what drives her since the crowd at the mall was much larger than at the recital, AND she played her song twice! After all that, it was fun to see her take the stage, dressed in my favorite colors, to successfully play her song...from memory.

These gloomy winter/spring days are perfect for projects like my recipes-to-computer exercise.  I'm all out of teacups from my grandmother's collection (I only have a few cups from her), but this one is fun.  It's the only (or one of the only) cup and saucer sets (that I know of) from a set of china that belonged to my great great grandmother.  The pattern was held in a factory in Germany.  That factory was destroyed during World War II, and with it went the pattern for this china. Well, I'm nowhere near finished with my project.  Scanning the recipes and hacking them into my recipe software takes time.  But I'm seeing some interesting trends as I go through these cards.  I have seen recipes dating back to the mid 1940s, the 1990s, and everything in between.  But even without the dates written on the cards, it isn't too hard to tell which era the recipe is from. Recipes from the 40s and 50s mostly include whole/real foods ...

Well, this is the last teacup from my grandmother’s collection of teacups. I still have several recipes to go I'm not quite half way through the cards), but I’m getting closer. Deciphering hand writing, interpreting ingredients (some of the things that they used in the 50s are no longer available), and scanning the recipes for photos definitely takes time. I did find the non-dessert section finally, and right now I am entering my third recipe for “Chicken Supreme”.  Perhaps “duplicates” is a good defense for computerizing.

A while ago the recipe box, with my grandmother's recipes, was dropped and the recipes were scattered.  When I put them back in the box they were not in any particular order.  I figured when I computerized each one it would be categorized as I went along.  It appears that I have hit a clump of recipes from the dessert section...ALL the recipes for the past couple of days have been sweets. I'm hoping I find some not-sweets recipes further down the pile or this is going to be a very lopsided cookbook.

We were invited to the "sweet 16" birthday party of Patrick's girlfriend.  It was a surprise party including family and friends, food, games, music, and laughter.  It was a lovely evening celebrating a lovely lady. Limbo!  Can you remember the last time (or the first) that you ever did the limbo?  Patrick and Elizabeth are awesome at it! I have it on good authority that the balloons were not coordinated with Elizabeth's dress.  What a lucky stroke of color!

Today’s favorite recipe find, in my little project of digitizing part of my grandmother’s recipe collection, is this recipe for Cashew Yummies. Not only does it have a fun name, on the back it says “3-25-76 Bren and Amber’s Shower".  Many of the recipes have a note of some kind indicating when they were used and what it was for.  This adds so much depth to the history that these recipes have seen. Mental note.  From now on, record, on the recipe, fun events that the recipe gets used for.

As my recipe project continues, I am struck by the kinds of things they took for granted when writing out recipes.  I just completed a recipe from the 50s that had all of the instructions written out, and at the end it said “top with meringue”.  I have made meringue before, but not so often that I could just pull it out of my head and top a pie with it.  The women who used these recipes would have learned, from a very young age, how to cook the basics of their every day menu, from scratch and from memory.