Patty's Recipe Page

I have been collecting and cataloguing recipes for many, many years. The Net allows me to share them with all you Web Crawlers looking for something new to cook!

Think the order's backwards? I don't. That's part of my philosophy of cooking: always think of dessert first. You just eat the rest so you can eat dessert, anyway. Which brings us to . . .

Each person develops their own cooking "style". Many factors determine how you cook: what you like, what your spouse likes, what your kids like, how weight-conscious you are, what part of the world you are from, how your family cooked while you were young, how much a part of your life food is, how much you like to cook, whether or not you like to follow recipes to a "t", how much you like to experiment . . . on and on. Each cook has a unique cooking personality. It follows that each person's recipe collection reflects their cooking personality.

My cooking personality? I began cooking only desiring to bake cookies, cakes, and pies. But, the old family metabolism kicked in, and I had to watch those calories. So, I began baking breads. Since I liked to cook but couldn't survive on dessert and bread alone, I looked to main dishes. I enjoy spending time in the kitchen, pots a-bubbling and bread a-baking, so some of my recipes take a lot of time. But, some don't, since I work full time, and refuse to eat food from a fast food restaurant or a package. You won't find any vegetable or salad recipes in my collections, because we like our vegetables as close to raw as possible, untainted by cooking or heavy dressings. We eat a salad each night with dinner, consisting of a variety of lettuces and raw vegetables. Cooked vegetables? Steamed lightly, only, with a sprinkling of almonds or lemon, perhaps. Soups? I just throw anything I feel like into the pot, rarely following a recipe. Travelling through the late sixties and the seventies, I picked up many ideas from natural, "health food" cooking. These ideas tamed down a bit with the years, trading health food ideas for what my family would actually eat, and then expanding to include the low-fat nutrition ideas which are currently so popular.

My collection includes only recipes that I really like and that I make frequently. I didn't just gather the recipes from cookbooks and throw them into a database: it's a very personal collection. Each recipe is prepared several times and modified if necessary before I deem it good enough to be made a permanent part of my collection.

I hope that a few of my recipes will overlap with your own cooking personality and that you will enjoy them as much as I do!

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