Home Again Home Again Jiggity Jig!

Back home again after visiting the family. It was a great vacation. I spent time visiting friends and family....and a LOT of cooking and baking.  Sadly, the drive back through the parks was almost as miserable weather wise as going there, but I snapped a picture anyways :)

While visiting, I made all my goto's, Peanut Butter cookies, Ginger cookies, Iced pumpkin cookies, Nanaimo bars (Nanaimo is a city in British Columbia), and more of the yummiest Carrot cake ever that I made 2 weeks ago. Half I left for my daughter and the other half I froze for a friend of mine.

I also did a lot of cooking (homemade Pizza, Spaghetti and Meatballs, Shepherds pie ...well Cottage pie actually since it was made with hamburger, and Chicken Pot Pie). I think I gained 10 lbs!  but that is ok, my friend and I are going to be accountable to each other for losing weight...or at least behaving :)

While I was in the big city of Prince George (75,000 people), I stopped in at a used book store called The Final Chapter. It's a great store and the gentleman who works there (owner?) is very friendly and helpful. I highly recommend checking it out if you are looking for something to read. Downtown is somewhat ugly and in need of some tender loving care, but hopefully that will change soon, but unless folks go shopping down there - it won't revitalize...ok, enough about inner-city politics. The kids each picked out a book for themselves - Percy Jackson and a Halo novel, respectively, while I found myself a nice very well preserved copy of a 1950 shortening recipe booklet by Jewel Shortening. I've never even heard of them, but they are Canadian. The recipes listed sound delicious and I want to make everything!  Yay Canada!

I love these brand cook books. The recipes all seem tried, tested,  and published proudly by the company. The recipes were meant to represent the company and promote brand loyalty, they wouldn't fill it with recipes that did not do the company proud,  unlike a lot of cookbooks nowadays where it seems like they dumped in a bunch of untested recipes just to fill the books and make sales.

I think the older Purity, Five Roses, and Robin Hood cookbooks I have try their best to have great recipes, where as the Culinary Arts and American Woman's cookbook have some questionable recipes, but I think the objective of those 2 books are to be encyclopedic in nature and cover everything they possibly can.  That being said, up next are Brownies from The Culinary Arts Institute Cook Book from the 1950's.

Cya then!