Lessons learned from my mom's old recipe box

Yesterday I cleaned out my pantry and found my mom's old recipe box that lay hidden away sitting on an upper corner shelf for years. After dusting it off, I peeked inside and found a little bit of long forgotten family history and also discovered a couple of things about myself.

• Who would have guessed? My mom must have had a deep fondness for "coleslaw". How else could she account for five different recipes for coleslaw, plus three duplicate recipe cards with my grandmother's "coleslaw dressing" painstakingly hand typed. Now when I say hand typed, I mean typed on an old fashioned typewriter. When my mother saved a recipe, it wasn't ripped out of a newspaper or hastily printed out on a scrap piece of paper. She put a lot of effort into typing each recipe on a blank 3x5 card back in the day when there was no spell check and no quick and easy way to go back and correct mistakes. In fact, computers were just a dream in someone's imagination. I'm still stumped why she had so many copies of her mom's coleslaw dressing. Did she fear losing it? Or, maybe she wanted to have extra copies on hand?
• My mom probably didn't care much for chocolate. (gasp!) Out of the dozens of recipes I found, only two contained chocolate, including a recipe for "chocolate mousse" and another one for "almost candy bars." There were no chocolate brownie recipes or chocolate cake recipes or even chocolate chip cookie recipes. After coming to grips over my deep disappointment of not finding a hidden gem of chocolate delishiousness, an "aha!" moment struck--my mom had to work for a living. Dinner came from boxes and cans and sometimes from the grocery freezer section. For a single mom, time was precious and energy sapped by time dinner rolled around. Too bad I failed to realize then, what seems so very obvious now. If I had, maybe--just maybe, I would have bit my tongue every time canned peas or cottage cheese were served.
• I doubt my mother and I would have gotten along well in the kitchen. For her, dinner time was all about getting it on the table quickly and into our tummies even quicker. For me, dinner is still about the taste and healthiness factors, always keeping in mind the goal of using up whatever I happen to have on hand at the moment. Preparing dinner sometimes takes hours (if not days) from the actual planning stage to getting it on the table. On the flip side, if it took more than 20 minutes to prepare and plunk down in front of the kids, it was not going to happen in my mother's kitchen. 
• One last note about my mom. Never, ever, would she have considered trying out 20 different zucchini recipes in an effort to get rid of garden surplus. I, on the other hand, stand guilty as charged. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure my mother would have considered it torture for the cook and even worse for those who had to eat it.

Just for the record, my brothers and I were far from deprived simply because homemade goodies were a rarity.  There were times we would discover hidden packages of Hostess Cupcakes or Doritos shoved out of sight. But that's not all, sometimes Ding Dongs or even Ho Hos made an appearance on a regular basis. Thanks Mom--you were the best!

Mom's Cole Slaw Dressing

 (from the kitchen of my Grandmother Emma Lucille Buckley)

1 cup Mayo

1/2 cup Sugar

1/4 cup White Vinegar

Combine and mix until sugar is dissolved. Store in refrigerator.