For years I have wanted an easy way to set up and maintain a collection of Colvin Family recipes on the website, but there has been no easy solution for that until now.  The tools that are available on our new social networking website make the job easy.

You know the kind of recipes I'm talking about-- the ones jammed into the drawer that used to house a breadbox in your mother's or grandmother's kitchen.  Or maybe yours are tidily organized into a 3"x5" filecard box.  Or even better, they are the recipes that have been around so long that nobody needs to write them down anymore.  At any rate, they are the recipes that are used for family gatherings at the holidays, or at weddings and funerals.  We all have some of those.

We need those recipes.  They are the perfect antidote to the highly-modified, overly-prepared, mass-produced foods that have shaped our palates for the last 60 years.  They are comfort foods--not necessarily "heart smart", and should be consumed in small quantities (an antidote to obesity?), but they taste infinitely better (to those of us who grew up with them) than those foods "prepared on the go" that fill our plates today.

They are the foods prepared in the "old-fashioned" way.  When I was growing up, I never understood why my grandmother always sifted the flour before making bread.  She told me that the dough would rise better in the oven, but it didn't make any sense to me at all, particularly since she immediately thereafter would spend a good ten minutes beating and punching the dough.  Much later in life I learned that sifting the flour was a way to get the bugs out.  Nowadays the flour gets pitched with bugs, and the very thought of eating food made from some critter's larval home causes our stomachs to churn.  Poor people, as many of our relatives were, learned to live quite happily with such accommodations to nature.  As the planet prepares to strike back at us for our over indulgence and our excess, there may be a lesson we can learn.

Enough time on the soapbox!  Gather up some of those favorite recipes and post them here for all of us to share.  Tell us about your memories--even your mealtime traditions.  Let's pass them on to the next generation.