Thanks for the great recipes, Alison! Don’t hesitate to give us many more if you can be bothered. I always love reading your blog!

Thank you, Alison! These look wonderful!

I remember those early days with my first borne. I had no plan to stay home, and yet I just couldn’t leave him. 🙂

I made the cranberry bars for a Christmas class get together when you first posted it when you sent the recipe to a family that was hosting your son on mission I think (?). Desserts and I don’t have a great relationship…I can make a 5 course meal, but not dessert. Go figure. Maybe it is because I am not a dessert lover myself. Anyhow, I tried anyways, thinking that at least you would never know they turned out inedible…but they didn’t! And even I liked them! They were a hit with the class parents, especially. I almost feel ready for the torte. I have a husband with a chocolate tooth, but me, I just want to make it ‘cuz its pretty….

Yum! On the oats in the cookie recipe: Is it 5 cups oats before you grind them into flour, or 5 cups oat flour? And how do you grind them? Will a blender work, or do you need a food processor?

Thanks for posting. I can’t wait to try them.

In our family, the comfort foods were cheese spoonbread and bacon cornmeal waffles. Outside of our family, not many people have heard of them. Those were the foods we’d request for our birthdays. 😉

I have a few recipes of my mother’s that were her mother’s before her. Most of them are in my own handwriting because like you, I was sat down and asked to copy them out. But my favourites are the ones that I have that are in my mom’s own handwriting. She’s gone now, but I remember her each time I flip through my recipe box.

Julia: measure the oats first, and thank you for the heads-up–I just clarified it in the recipe. I have a food processor, so I haven’t tried it in a blender.

I still have a recipe that was handwritten by a young man that passed away much too early in his live – 21. It’s for a fruit pizza, which I will never make, but it is in his handwriting and I can’t throw it away. The same with all my grandmother’s recipes that she wrote for me for when I went to collage – including the one on how to cook an elephant.

It’s only recently that I got bit by the cooking bug. My reflex was to go to my mother for some recipes. More often than not though, she makes me a photocopy, but I did get to browse through my grandmother’s handwritten recipe book. Lots of heritage to live up to!

Thank you for sharing some of yours. 🙂

I loved this post. It brought back a lot of my own family memories. The recipe I treasure the most is from my grandma, written by hand, who passed away in 1991 at the age of 99.

I have that cookie recipe – it’s a favourite everytime I make it. And I’ve ground the oats in both a blender and food processor – they both work, but you need to do it in batches when you use the blender.
I sat one day and watched my Mom make her cabbage rolls and another day watch her make lasagne – marking down EVERYTHING she did. Measurements aren’t as important when cooking (different for baking), but just knowing the receipes are written down is important. I also have some of my Dad’s recipes that I recreated after he passed and wrote them down for future needs.

Isn’t it wonderful that we finally have a world where women – especially mothers – have options? It’s funny… I always wanted a career, but now, what I want most is to sit at home and write, with my fur-girls milling around.

Might have to make those cranberry bars tonight.

I have all of Amalie’s recipes, but the only thing I make (in my condition) is her hotcakes. I really need to try her waffles which were so light and fluffy that you’d practically have to eat them off the ceiling!

When I moved into my own apartment many years ago, my eldest sister taught me many of her recipes, and by the time Am and I were married, I was a pretty good cook. But she was also darned good. Ah, well, those days now long gone.

Humor –
This is the story of the young lady who called her boy friend one day, saying, “Would you please come help me with this jigsaw puzzle? I’m having a dickens of a time.” “What’s the picture on the box?” he asked. “Well there’s a big red rooster.” “I’ll be right over.” And he was. And he saw these pieces spread out all over the table. He took one look at the box and said, “Okay, let’s just relax and have a cup of tea. Then we’ll put all these cornflakes back in the box.”

WAHOO! After 6+ months I finally have the cranberry bar recipe! And it’s mine, all mine… well, and everyone else who reads your blog, I suppose. I even have cranberries in the freezer, just waiting for a chance to be baked into cookies.

Thanks!
Sam

Oh, and just so you know my looong education hasn’t gone to waste, here’s what the PhD has taught me…

Good part of being an adult: realizing you can make an entire batch of cranberry bars and eat it all by yourself like you always wanted to as a child.

Bad part of being an adult: knowing what the word “calorie” actually means, and why you therefore should not *actually* consume an entire batch of aforementioned cranberry bars.

Yum. I, too, experienced the married-to-a-grad-student-and-staying-home-with-kids life. We were so poor, but we were every bit as happy, maybe more so.

Now I think I need to share another experience with you and try those cranberry bars!

Allison, thanks for posting the recipes. I can’t wait to try them. Our youth group is having an auction soon to raise money for a mission trip. I was trying to come up with something creative to donate-cookies are just the thing. A plate with samples to taste and then the frozen cookies ready to pop in the oven for sale. One question, how long do you cook the frozen dough?

My family’s never had much money, so we have very few “heirlooms”….except a cake recipe. It has been the “go to” cake recipe in my mother’s family for a long time. When my grandmother spent a winter with my mom, my mom, a home ec. major, had my grandmother make “the cake”, so she could stop her at each step and measure the ingredients to get a recipe. My grandmother, and all the women before her, used their hands and fingers as their measuring tools. My grandmother was very patient (for her!) but amused and, at one point, commented, “This isn’t cooking; it’s chemistry!” The cake in question, I figured out after some research, is pretty much a standard gold cake, a recipe popular in the late 1800’s, in texture between a yellow cake and a pound cake. But it’s precious to us because of its family history. When my daughter and I made it a few years ago to take to a gathering at the 1880’s historical site where we volunteer, we became, respectively, the 5th and 6th generations of women in our family to use this recipe! It’s also the cake my mom makes for me every year for my birthday. Yes, I’m spoiled–thanks for noticing! 😉

Hey Mom– I cut the sugar in the “Mrs. Field’s” recipe down by 25% (because I always do that; normal cookie recipes are too sweet for me). It worked out great.

Look, look, I fixed it! http://www.samvslupus.com/2017/07/my-moms-chocolate-chip-cookies-with.html