A Family Masterpiece

I've got to pass along a boatload of credit to my cousin Kelly for a wonderful tradition she started. Kelly is the scrapbooking genius of our family and a few years ago she started a cookbook of Mamaw's most 'famous' recipes. Every year Kelly scraps together several pages with new recipes and new pictures.

It's come to be something we all look forward to every Christmas, and the book continues to get thicker and thicker. Thank you Kelly for all of this hard work!

There's a mix of very recent pictures and very old ones, which are the most fun to look at.

Look at my studly Papaw as a young man

And my beautiful young Mom holding baby me.


Today I referenced this page, Mamaw's chicken and dumplins (except I used turkey leftover from our Christmas bird). Such an easy noodle recipe...flour and stock, roll it out and cut it into squares using a pizza cutter.


I boiled those noodles along with some turkey meat in a big pot of stock and it looked something like this...





My side of the family is not the only one with a family cookbook. Jeremy made this old thing in 1995 in memoriam of his grandfather, and we still reference it all the time. It is spattered, stained, ripped and well loved.

I've thought of laminating the pages so it doesn't fall apart, but haven't brought myself to undertaking that task as it is almost 300 pages long.

Passing the family traditions and recipes seems to be part of a long standing holiday tradition for which we are eternally grateful.