Family ties food preparation; Recipe book may build with each generation

My sister Michelle recently moved right into a new apartment in Colorado and finally has a full-sized kitchen. She asked us to send recipes so she can eat herself and the woman boyfriend as well as get a style of the home and people she misses daily.

I'm not much of a cook, but I love recipes. I clip them from magazines as well as newspapers, and we collect cookbooks, reading them for fun. Sometimes I truly use them for actual cooking.

But for my sister, we open the only book I really ever utilize - a collection concerning recipes Michelle commissioned from the family members to give to me as bridal shower gift over 10 years ago.

In this pretty but stained three-ringed the best paleo cookbook are tons of present-written recipes from cousins, aunts, my mother, my mother-in-law and many.

I know exactly how to locate the dishes Michelle wants but still I start at the beginning. Page 1, per recipe concerning mushroom-stuffed brie, scrawled in my cousin Maria's hasty print. A few page moves finds the tidy Palmer script of Aunt Nina's recipe for spiritual being the hair pasta with scallops and lemon-mustard sauce. Then there is the familiar cursive which I've seen in letters, cards and records for 40 years - my mom's manicotti which I always help the woman prepare but never dared to make on my favorite own, knowing it might never, ever compare.

In Grandma's perfect, meticulous script are directions for fettuccine alongside asparagus and smoked salmon, a zucchini and cheese casserole, pizza rustica.

My fingers trace the curlicues and and I recall her voice. She's been missing just a year, but the longer we read, the clearer that sound is, followed by other sense-memories - her hugs, her scent, her laughter.

I am glad that, for a while when we had been living not thus far away, I was able to cook for her, even whenever they were simple things like chicken pot pie or full peppers. She is always proud of my efforts.

Even Grandpa contributed to this particular collection, a happy surprise. He prepared the best breakfast smoothies, many years before these people were actually called "smoothies" - but it never occurred on me that he had a recipe for anything.

Yet here that it is - tucked between Maria's shepherd's pie and Michelle's chicken a la Joanie - printed in messy all-capital letters. Grandpa's recipe for rolled fillet of sole. The same fingers that created and played reams of award-winning guitar popular music, your same hand that cupped his grandchildren's faces when pride and love - that hand published these words on the page open before me. we shut my eyes and picture him or her busy in the kitchen, preparing this exact meal for that woman he cherished for decades, cooking just for her.

And typical of Grandpa, gone now five age, the recipe advises serving with a loaf of Italian bread, which he or she felt was essential to every meal.

We've been giving Michelle recipes and sharing together too - via elizabeth-mail, of course.

Exactly I wish in which instead we were scribbling with pens and also sending paper through the post office. Today's recipes might be great additions to a book that I hope my personal family will someday value as much as I do.

Someday it will be the handwriting of their grandparents, their aunts and uncles and cousins that they find among its pages.

Offering much more than ingredients and measurements, this pretty, stained treasure might you need to be the greatest gift item I've ever received.