06.25.1913 to 06.09.2013

The one thing I remember most about Grandma is the cooking. Every meal she made was a feast. Every time we visited she was pulling hot cookies out of the oven. Every time anyone visited she was pulling hot cookies out of the oven.

The year I lived with her I learned that she kept cookie sheets with cookie dough all laid out in her freezer so when she received the phone call that someone was coming over she could pull them out to thaw and start preheating the oven.

Every time we left her house all those cookies, along with fresh cinnamon rolls, were packed into coffee cans and ice cream tubs and sent with us.


At the holidays there would be acres of homemade candy and all that pie.

I started collecting recipes when I was 12 and when I was 15 I sat down with Grandma for a long afternoon of copying out my favorite recipes of hers. As she leafed through her own large stack of recipe cards she told me stories about her life and the cooking was wrapped through it.

There was the cookbook that Grandpa had bought when solicited by a local woman's group. They had assembled it as a fund raiser and at the time Grandma had not wanted him to buy it since as a young couple it wasn't in their budget. However, it had turned out to be the best cookbook she had ever owned and become the only one she still turned to.

It was because of this story I started looking at the cookbooks put out by church groups and other organizations in used books stores and found my own best cookbook. Mine was assembled by an English as a Second Language class in Topeka and has wonderful, tasty, exotic recipes using easy to find local ingredients.

There were many other stories, such as the one about how Grandpa would ask for Marshmallows when she would offer to buy him candy at the store. About her children cooking and about the gardening. About the babies and the farm dog in the garden undoing the work she had just finished. How she liked onions but Grandpa didn't like the onion breath so she avoided them.There were more about the Divinity candy and the Date Pudding but I don't rember them now. Maybe they will come to me later.

She didn't stop with the new recipes either. Later in collage I sat down again because she had added two new cookies that I just loved. One was low sugar Pumpkin Cookie and the other was a sugar free Oatmeal Fruit Cookie.

A cross stitch greeted us a we walked into her home, made by one of her daughters, that had the end line

My Grandma is best by far because she has a cookie jar.

So true.