My Grandma Weinant passed away in 2005 at the age of 95. Her house was full of nooks and crannies which were, in turn, full of things. Some of these things were precious, and some, not so much. We spent days sorting and cleaning and sharing out treasures. I became the proud owner of antique dishes, antique furniture, jewelry (some precious, some just questionable), and a myriad of knick-knacks, sewing items, old bobby pins, and canning jars, to name a few things.
      My Grandma lost her mother when she was 9 years old. Her father was devastated, and Grandma, along with her sisters and brothers, essentially became an orphan. She had a grandmother that she loved, but she spent many of her growing-up years living with one family or another until she got married at the age of 15. She and my grandpa were married for 70 years.
      My great grandparents were sheepherders and ran a sawmill in the mountains of western Colorado. Grandma graduated from the 8th grade. She met my grandpa and when his mother told him he better not kiss her unless he intended to marry her, he promptly kissed her.  Grandpa tried his hand at a few things, including working in the orchards, until he settled on the grand career of Cowpoke. He became the foreman of the Stirrup Bar ranch and he took to cowboying like a duck to water. He was a consummate cowboy and remained so until long after he could no longer ride a horse.
     My grandma had a zest for life and could make doing laundry and preserving vegetables sound like the grandest of adventures. She had my older brother and I fighting over who got the privilege of mowing the lawn with the push lawn mower. We had tea parties and a Kool-aid stand out in the middle of nowhere, up in the mountains.
     Among the most precious things I inherited from my grandma, besides the antique buttons and the value that anything can be fun, if you have the right attitude, was most of her collection of recipes. My grandma was a good cook, her food was rich and full of cream and butter. It included venison and beef roasts, shepherd's pies, homemade cinnamon rolls, and cheese sandwiches made with Velveeta. Her recipes range from potluck casseroles to old country recipes from my grandpa's side of the family. In the old box of loose recipes, I found recipes for soap, liniment, wine, and the cover and a few pages of an old Fannie Farmer cookbook.
     For a large portion of her life Grandma cooked on a wood stove. While I don't have a wood stove, I have cooked on one, and it is an art. My mission is to now try these recipes in a modern kitchen. Perhaps not the soap, or the liniment, maybe not even the wine, but the tea cakes and casseroles, white cakes and muffins, perhaps even the recipes written in German, of which I speak not a lick. This blog will be a log of my experiences.