I admit it. I am a recipe hoarder.  If the guys at Turner wanted to take the short ride to Conyers to start a new series I could be the STAR of “Recipe Hoarders”. In all of my 25 pounds of overweight glory, I would be a star. All the producers would have to do is spend two minutes in my kitchen cabinets and I am GUILTY as charged.

I get it honestly. My condition can be traced back to my maternal grandmother and my mother. When my dad decided to downsize several years ago and move to Florida, I was the recipient of all of the family recipes. Most consisted of loose newspaper clippings with recipes sent into the Louisville Courier Journal many years ago. My grandmother, Rea Tucker, had several recipes listed in the paper. I am sure at that time when the “Woman’s Place Was In the Home” it was a “Badge of Honor” to be published in the Society Page Recipe section. In fact, the most interesting part of these recipes was not what was on the front but what was on the back.  Many of these were clipped during the 40’s during World War II–the war to end all wars–yeah, right.

On the backs of these recipes with missing or a just a little bit of caption, I have pictures of Eisenhower when he was a General talking to a guy in a Kilt, and on the back of one was a photo of members from all of the armed services carrying a flag draped coffin to his grave. Another showed a group of “Arab Prisoners at ACRE waiting on a ramp outside the city prison under Jewish Guard, following the fall of the city to the main Jewish Army”. There also was printed on the back of one recipe the instructions on how to make an Adam Bomb (I kid you not…and we thought the internet had too much information!) The article was dated March 20, 1947. I also found a few clippings in an envelope with a postmark of August 27, 1937. There are some great recipes and also a bit of history.

My favorite had to be the one on the back of a note my great grandfather wrote to a patient. He was a doctor in Campbellsville, KY. Hand written on a piece of lined notebook paper, his not said, “Mrs. Jones-give the codeine tablets 2 for dose hypodermically as may be needed. If they fail to keep him fairly comfortable you may give him one table morphine.” We may have no idea what his ailment was BUT if that did not work you could have turned the sheet over and on the other side, handwritten once again, a biscuit recipe!!! So you see I come by recipe hoarding naturally.

For years I subscribed to all sorts of cooking magazines: Cooks Illustrated, Cuisine at Home, Cooks Country, and the list goes on and on. I either kept every one of the magazines or I clipped out my favorite ones to keep and try later. THIS, on top of saving every recipe from the Sunday AJC and Southern Living. THEN… SWEET Jesus ….the Food Channel came along. IF Bobby Flay or Guy Fieri cooked it or has someone on Triple D cook it, I printed it.  I have sheets piling up everywhere.. How many more recipes did I need for catfish, gumbo, mashed potatoes, or green beans?  ENOUGH WAS ENOUGH! I was being overtaken by the ghost of Justin Wilson and Julie Childs. I needed help. I needed an intervention ! I needed Recipes Anonymous!

Finally sanity took over. I thought, what about cataloging all of these in an order easy to read and easy to find, when needed. So , I spent the last two weeks painstakingly going through every recipe I had and placed them in a three ring binder stuck inside the plastic sleeves that normally hold more important items than gravy and grits recipes, but it worked. Since I now have a clean shelf with four binders in an order easy to find and follow, I pledged to clip no more. Let’s go through these recipes first and after exhausting all of the ways to prepare beef tongue and grits I will once again begin my pursuit of recipe clipping. AND when I do fall off the wagon , I will only do that through Food Channel shows or Gardens and Guns, the only magazine of real interest to me anymore, IF you don’t count of course Playboy and The Family Handyman.