A bit of advice

Last night we had a few friends over for a BBQ, and I made, among other things, a lemon poppyseed cake. It was one of my Mom's recipe. Despite not having made it in years, for some reason it popped into my head a few days ago and I thought it would go well after a summer meal of meat cooked on the grill. I had to laugh as I dug it out of my recipe "ziploc". All of my most treasured recipes are those that are written on scraps of paper, or those that are printed out as part of emails that had been sent to me, and that have been shoved into a big ziploc bag. Some of them aren't even folded well. I suppose I could transfer all of them onto nicer paper, with neater writing that's easier to read and would make sense to people other than me, but I think there's something really charming about my random recipe collection in the ziploc. Most of them are things my Mom emailed me or told me over the phone. Included in the ziploc are a few pages from the first Thanksgiving dinner I ever made. I guess that would've been in 1996 or 1997. I wrote out very carefully how to make a turkey and gravy and stuffing, etc., all according to my Mom's suggestions. The lemon poppyseed cake recipe was scribbled onto a big piece of orange paper. I have no idea why I had orange paper sitting around my house at the time. On the back of the paper were some notes in my old roommate Kristina's handwriting. That means it had to be from 1997 or earlier. In addition to the list of ingredients, I had written a number of special instructions like "add one egg at a time and beat well after each egg". I can't tell you how much I wished I could have called my Mom to make sure I had all the special instructions written correctly. Overall, the cake turned out fine, other than the fact that the top layer remained in the bundt pan after I flipped it upside down. This is a very long story for just one bit of advice-- don't wait until it's too late to get those favorite family recipes written down somewhere. It doesn't matter where-- orange scraps of paper are fine-- but just do it. Believe me, there will come a day when you'll want to be able to make your Mom's favorite lemon poppyseed cake, and you'll be glad that you saved those notes you took 10 years ago.