"Are you ever going to write a cook book?"

"A belief that I have come to to the be a home cook by fate and found myself to be a reliable source enough that is new and useful to justify the undertaking is my excuse for issuing “Yezball’s Continuous Collection of Modern Home Cookery."

 

I am constantly getting the question of, when are you going to write your own cookbook? And you know my answer is always kind of just like, erm, I don't, I'm not, uhh, possibly. That's not my main goal right now, I don't particularly want to write one particular cookbook at this point, because my interest is kind of in the more enveloped in the niche art of note keeping and recipe recording. My personal foodways and community foodways are coming from every expression of my life and I want to include all of the expressions and flavors of my life because food centers all of those moments.

 

I take meticulous notes while I'm cookin and I've been doing so while I'm cooking through the Erie cookbook. I maintain my recipes on index cards and theme them to all the seasons of my life, good, bad, ugly, and that's how my recipe collection continues growing and that's the recipe collection will continue to grow. That, my friends, is how I want to share my foodself everybody. I have a come up with a name for it that I feel like encompasses it to be exactly what it is, and it is Yezball's Continuous Collection of Modern Home Cookery and Other Kitchen Fundamentals. It's very me. It's chaotic. It is a little messy. It's pulled from everywhere and everything and every expression and experience in my life. The collection isn’t polished or perfect, but it’s an authentic attempt to celebrate the meals that connect me to my loved ones and my community and also reflect my journey as a home cook.

 

My mission is simple: to encourage others to start their own recipe collections and to build a bridge between the physical act of cooking and the shared experiences that come from it. I plan to continue revising The Erie Cook Book, contributing to Erie’s food culture, and aim to expand the Erie region's culinary heritage.  I hope that I am bringing something to the table that is local, informative, and will shake you out of your comfort zone. And I just want to say that these recipes are kitchen tested. I am cooking these recipes frequently. I It's not something that I'm just looking at, choosing, retyping it and putting it in there, like I am testing these recipes in the kitchen. I am making them. I'm shopping for the ingredients locally, as locally as possible. So they are kitchen test recipes, and they are all delicious. I would not put forth anything that I did not want to eat or drink.

 

In today’s digital world, the value of a handwritten recipe may seem small, but to me, it’s priceless. I record every recipe by hand because it feels like a way of capturing my essence in the kitchen, of giving it a presence that a screen simply can’t. A handwritten recipe holds a kind of generational magic, whether you know that feeling or you are the one creating it; it’s an heirloom in the making. My phone, no matter how useful, isn’t what I want to pass down one day. But my recipe collection? That’s another story.

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Kindly, 

Morgan 

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@yezball