Barbara's Cookbook

In a few previous posts, I’ve mentioned a cookbook that someone gave me when I got married.  This is where I got the recipes for Auntie Pearl’s sweet and sour chicken and Auntie Laurel’s comfort soup.  I promised I’d sometime devote a post to the cookbook itself because it is such a treasure, so here it is.

The cookbook was given to me by Barbara.  She has known me since I was two years old, when I attended the preschool she had in her home.  But her influence in my life did not end when I went off to kindergarten.

She and my mom developed a friendship, and Kimiko and I became friends with her two youngest sons, who are our ages.  Over the years, we’ve gone to school with her boys, carpooled together, spent holidays with her family, and now she and Robbie work at the same school.

When I got engaged, she collected recipes, photos, and notes from friends and family members.  She put them all together in a beautiful recipe book that I absolutely love.  It would actually be more accurate to describe it as a scrapbook that happens to contain recipes.  She put so much love and work into it—I can’t imagine how long it took her to put it together.

She started it out with a page where I can put photos of my family (I still need to do this).

Barbara asked each person to submit a recipe and a photograph.  These are the recipes and photos submitted by our mom and Kimiko.

Yup, that's the two of us when we were little.  The puppy is Peru, the first
Guide Dog we raised.

She also gave everyone a card to write a note to me, and precisely cut through the page protectors so I can open and read them without having to take the pages out.

In addition to the pages she designed and decorated, she included blank pages throughout so I can add my own recipes or collect more from other people.  This blank page is across from our Grandma’s pot pie recipe.

Here is a really cute page she did for her son Josh’s recipe (he’s a chef).  He makes these barbeque-bacon chestnuts every Christmas—yum!

All the recipes are organized into categories.

If you clicked on the above picture to see it larger, you would have noticed that the last category is pet food.  Yes, some friends submitted pet food recipes.  If you know our family, this will not surprise you.  For those of you who don’t know us, we have been involved with Guide Dogs for the Blind for about ten years and are also involved with Dogs4Diabetics.  (Take a few minutes to click on the links to both organizations and see how their amazing dogs transform lives!)

She typed some of the recipes to make them fit better, but wanted me to have all the originals.  The back cover of the book has an envelope that holds them.

As you can see, this cookbook that Barbara made for me is truly special.  It contains some of my favorite recipes and represents a lot of the people who have been influential in my life.  I will always cherish this book.