Recipe Box Counseling

I can’t tell you how jazzed I am after getting together with a friend for coffee this week. A couple of months ago, when I started getting really deep into the recipe-box rabbit hole, I asked friends to share pictures of their recipe collections. Tina replied, “I JUST found my grandmother’s recipes and am at a loss!”

 We paged through the recipes together while she told me about her Sicilian grandmother and stories of the tins of cookies the family got from her every Christmas, along with other family stories and reflections that the recipes brought to mind.

 She had texted a couple of days before we got together saying she was looking through the recipes for the first time in ages and worried I’d be disappointed the collection is mostly Italian cookies.

 Absolutely not, I assured her. Whatever’s in the collection, there’s a story in there. Or two or three or many more. And there were.

 I loved getting to share that time with Tina, an opportunity to learn a bit more about her family and background through those recipes. She left inspired to follow through on a few things we talked about, bake some of those cookies her grandmother was famous for, and consider ways to share these recipes with family. And I left feeling energized by her enthusiasm and by seeing the sparks of delight as she realized what a treasure that folder full of recipes is.

 That’s exactly what Long Live the Recipe Box is all about. I plan to do more of what I did with Tina, one-on-one “consulting” (though I don’t like that work for this, “counseling” perhaps?) to help people navigate their recipe collections, building up their recipe collections, review what’s in their collection and how they might use/share those recipes….

If that’s something you might be interested in, you can learn a bit more here.