The College Recipe Cards

When I went to college, I first spent time in dorms, like many college students do.  Then, after half-way through college,  I moved out of the dorm and into my own place.  And that meant I had a kitchen.  And that meant I could cook dinner.

Only, I'd only helped my mother cook dinner before and while I was excellent at frying up some Steak'ums or heating a can of soup, I'd never really cooked a whole meal before.  So my mother decided to help me out. 

She went through her recipe box and selected some recipes that she thought I'd both like and that I would be able to easily make.  When she gave them to me, all written up on nice little note cards, I suddenly decided that I needed a recipe box myself and that I would learn to cook some of those recipes soon enough for my roommate and maybe some of our friends.

Some of those recipes I remember to this day and still make.  Other things were good suggestions, like ideas for side items that would be easy and healthy to serve.  I was reminded of the cards just the other day when I had a sample of something that brought back memories from years ago.   It was a dish of rice, chicken tenders wrapped in dried beef with a can of cream of chicken soup poured on top.   I love that dish.  I'm going to have to make it soon because thinking about it now is only making me hungry.

I hadn't thought about those cards my mother made for me in a long time although I still have them in my recipe folder (down at my desk in my file drawer at this point because I look most things up online).  They were a good way to get a start cooking in your first real home.   Good times.

The Big Boy Update:  The cup and string telephone.  We watched Sesame Street today and they had a cup-and-string telephone on the show.  My mother, who was over helping out with the children, said she'd never made one and had I?  I couldn't remember, I'm sure I had, but no specific memories came to mind so I said, "let's make one now."  It took five minutes and we had a real working string phone.  My son wasn't interested at first, but later he thought it was great fun.  I told my husband, "it's a long string, we can't leave him alone with it or you know what will happen."  That's right, hooking.  We did let him hook it around the kitchen and dining room and we had fun seeing if you could still hear each other around corners and through cabinets (you can't.)

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  The excabator nap.  My daughter woke up from her nap this afternoon and suddenly excavators, (or excabators as she calls them) were on her mind.  Big machines have always been her brother's passion.  But for some reason her food, daddy, the dog and anything else seemed to have something to do with excavators today.  Maybe she dreamed about them.