The Reindeer Keeper

I knew if I did not make the banana bread yesterday that I had been planning on making, the bananas would be beyond rotten. They were already rotten enough. So, out came the pans and ingredients. The oven was on preheat. And my son Brian, was working on his latest piece of art on the kitchen counter. While he has two art desks, he sometimes prefers the kitchen counter because of the windows. So, as I was getting ready to mix the ingredients, he asked me what I was going to make. He loves banana bread, so his interest perked. As I began peeling the bananas, he told me they were rotten. I told him my grandmother (nicknamed Giddy) always said the rottener the bananas, the better, the tastier the bread. I told him it was her recipe that I was using. This led to talking about my grandmother and her woodstove and her recipes, her aprons, her bowl that I was putting the rotten bananas in. "That is Giddy's bowl?" he asked. "Yes. Maybe she used it when making her banana brea...

Green beans fresh from the garden were favorites growing up. Whether my grandmother was feeding a hungry crew in from the fields during haying season or whether she'd prepared some green beans for a family summer get together in her backyard, her green beans were always so delicious. When we'd gather for picnics those green beans quickly disappeared. They were consistent in their taste. All she did after cooking them was add some milk, a bit of butter, salt and pepper. I can still see her sitting outside on the back stoop of her farmhouse in her house dress and apron, cutting the ends off the beans, then slicing those beans fresh from the garden. My mother sometimes sat outside to cut the ends off her green beans, then slice them into pieces but more often than not, she'd have me do it. Maybe that's because I'd snip those ends off in record time. Slice them just as fast and enjoy a few along the way. After they were cooked, she prepared them as my grandmother did. T...

 Welcome to Page 133 of Betty Crocker's New Boys and Girls Cook Book printed in the 1960s. Way back when I was in Junior High/High School this page would be spread out on the kitchen counter in our house in the country right about now. After making the Funny Bunny Biscuits and Peter Rabbit Cake a few years in a row I really didn't need to refer to page 133 in that cookbook. By then I knew it all by heart. But going into the kitchen drawer and pulling the cookbook out had become just as much a tradition as making the biscuits and cake. So that's what I would do. The fun part of doing that was one thing lead to another. I'd sometimes make up my own recipes. I'd sometimes give the bunnies a body by using another biscuit and then add a small biscuit tail. I'd use the suggested raisins for the eyes and candied cherry for the nose and slivered almonds for the whiskers if my father had picked up some almonds when at the grocery store. Or instead of making a Peter Rabbi...

This is one of several b/w illustrations created by gifted illustrator-Suzanne Langelier-Lebeda for inside the pages of "The Reindeer Keeper." This particular piece is a favorite of mine. It reminds me of my mother's cookbooks. She treasured her cookbooks. She'd sift through their pages, reading each one like a novel-treating each one like a good friend. When she passed away, we divided the cookbooks between us and what I discovered to be even more fun than reading the recipes were the bits of paper and pages from notepads and looseleaf with recipes written on them in her handwriting mixed in with a few handwritten grocery and things-to-do lists. There was even the back of a bag of Nestles chocolate chips with the Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe on it. Whenever she found a recipe she liked in a magazine, or if someone recited a recipe for her to try, my mother would write it down and put it in a cookbook for safe keeping. My mother was a fine co...