Summer dreams and recipes

I know it's not officially summer yet, but I've been revelling in the warmth and the beauty of this time of year. June has to be one of my favourite months. I like the dreaminess of it, the sense of being able to relax and luxuriate in the sights of green leaves and flowers, the scents of lilacs and new-mown grass, the sounds of the birds and the drone of the lawn-mowers. Time was when poetry was the only writing I could do during these drowsy months. However, right now I'm busy with revising a teen novel, hoping it'll be good enough to sell.

But that's all by the way, because what I really want to write about in this post is recipes. I've been doing more cooking and baking of late and that got me thinking that I need to organize my recipes yet again. The difficulty is, as I realized to some surprise, recipes are rather like jewellery. They carry sentimental value, and therefore, some of them are hard to discard. I mean, there's the one I acquired years ago when our eldest daughter was still a toddler, and the mother of a friend of hers, as pressed for time as I was, gave me a chocolate cake recipe that begins, "Into your mixing bowl, hurl two eggs!" Then there are others that I inherited from my mother-in-law, and still more from my own mother, all in their own handwriting. Somehow, when I take those out, I feel connected with them once again. Maybe the best solution is to forget about throwing the recipes away and rather to find a good method of storing them .