One of my favorite parts of the weekend is the chance to read about recipes in the WSJ, in the NYT and in the NYT Magazine, because a lot of times on the weekend I'll actually get a chance to cook one of them. In fact, I'm now working on the assumption that for guests, I only cook recipes from my top tier business publications. :) ANYway, today's column in the Magazine is a reminder that cooking is never just about food, it's about friends, and family, and history. Like Dorothy, there are recipes for me so tied up in my memory of watching my mom cook (and yes, gravy is one of them) that it's hard for me to cook them.
I've played with a variety of online recipe sites, but tend to come back time and time again to my collection of solid analog cookbooks, and the big three ring binder of recipes I've scrawled and ripped out of different places, with notes from my eldest daughter when she taped them to paper and slipped them into plastic sheets ("beef for men" and "sourdough cinnamon rolls...yum!"). There is something still about cooking that defies the idea of computers, for me, at least. Maybe it's just because I'm...messy. ;)