An Heirloom Recipe Series

Extra Food Chat with Kath

Welcome to Extra Food Chat with Kath.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting my work. I am so happy to have you here and be able to share more with you.

As part of Extra Food Chat with Kath, I will be sharing a series of heirloom recipes that I have found in my Grandma’s collection. I will test them first and make any necessary changes before sharing the recipe with you, and also show you the original recipe as well. Take a look at the video* above for a little tour of the recipe collection I have from my Grandma.

My aim for this series is to preserve these recipes and my Grandma’s handwritten notes, and maybe find a few new favourite recipes along the way. I am calling them heirloom recipes as that is what I classify them as. I think some may consider heirloom recipes as those that are known well and treasured, but I classify them as anything that comes from a personal collection (whether family or not) that is part of that persons life and history. They are heirlooms and memories of that person, ready to be rediscovered and maybe even enjoyed again.

The recipes I am choosing are part of a collection of recipes I found after Grandma died in 2013. Not all of them are things I remember her making, some of them might not even be good! But I’d like to delve into them more, and take you with me.

My Grandma had a stroke in 2012 and ended up going to a nursing home. For almost a year (in between the stoke and her death) everything was left almost exactly as she had left it in ‘her’ areas of the house. Her bookshelf in the living room, the drawers in kitchen that contained most of her recipes and recipe books, many of the other kitchen drawers and cabinets that my Grandpa never ventured into were left untouched, even some ingredients like the flour in the pantry had not been touched since she last used them.

My Grandparents kitchen was built by them when they built their house in the 1960s. The kitchen never changed much in the time they lived there, except the addition of a dishwasher in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The oven was the same, and only needed replacing when my Grandpa was on his own and tried to heat up food in a plastic container in the oven. The results weren’t good.

I’m sure bits of pieces of my Grandma’s things had been taken by others in that year, but on the whole, those smaller more day to day things were as they had last been left by her.