Introduction

The story behind this blog started a few years ago when I was asked to help clean out an old run down house in Villisca, Iowa. And no, it wasn’t the Villisca House. I would take home, clean-up and try to sell what I found, and split the money with the owner. This turned out fairly well over the next several months and both the owner and I were satisfied with the results. Among the many boxes I went through there were some items that seemed to have little or no monetary value, including an old, rusty green recipe box full of, well, old recipes. I sat it aside and didn’t think about it again for a long while.

Recently I was cleaning out a part of my basement office and there it was again, the little old recipe box. I got to looking at it, thumbing through some of the contents when the idea of what to do with it began to form. I remembered coming across a website that posted scanned images of found items sent in from readers. I think this is the site.

What I decided to do is scan each recipe, from the front of the box to the back, in the order that the box was found. I also decided I would not go through the box before writing this blog but rather explore it with the reader, week by week, until finished.

I would imagine most of these kinds of things, after fetching some momentary attention, are put in the trash. I have my own recipe box at home that I use with regularity, and after all the years of organizing and adding to it I hate to think that when I am gone someone would just throw it away, but such is usually the case for such seemingly unimportant things. Worth it or not, the contents of this old recipe box will not meet that fate.

I look forward to this exploration, and I hope you will join me!