Framed Family Recipes

Hi Everyone! I wanted to share this simple and easy idea for framed family recipes with you today! A couple of weeks ago, we moved into a new house and even though there are still a couple of boxes to be unpacked, furniture to be bought and things to be fixed, it is slowly turning into the home that I had envisioned when we first bought it. So much has had to be moved in that we needed to hire moving vans like Southern Van Hire, so we could fit everything in for the day we needed! Moving is stressful no matter which way you do it. When it comes to interior design and creating your home, I think it’s all about layers. You begin with the basics, your walls, your floors, your furniture… and then you begin to build more layers – you start introducing more colors, more textures, more accessories, and all the personal touches that really make a home come to life and give it its heartbeat. For instance, I really like the photo prints I’ve seen on Bumblejax and am actually thinking about introducing some into my home to liven up the place somewhat!

I have a big stash of old family recipes that I somehow wanted to display in our kitchen and dining area. Some, like the one in the photo above, were handwritten by my great-grandmother in the early 1940’s, some were written out on a typewriter by my grandmother, and others are cut-outs from old newspapers, cookbooks and pamphlets. What I find so interesting is how much you can truly see into the lives of the people of the time just by reading through their recipe books. The handwritten Czech recipe above, as many others in my great-grandmother’s notebook, is entitled “Wartime recipe for…” From reading the ingredients, you can see what there was a shortage of at the time and how creative cooks became with learning to substitute various more readily available ingredients for the more sparse and expensive ones. Many of the recipes are for meatless dishes, and many use beans and potatoes (including desserts! — pastry cream out of white beans!), since that was what was available.

There are many personal stories that you can begin to see as you read between the lines of many of these recipes too. As a single woman living before the outbreak of the Second World War, my great-grandmother moved to England from Czechoslovakia, and several of the recipes I read in her notebook that she wrote later as a married woman upon her return home were clearly culinary memories of her years in London. These recipes, not just in their physical written form, have travelled many miles, countries and continents, and as I hang them up on my wall here on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, I wonder which of our current family favorites will survive the test of time, and where life will take them one day!

This simple craft idea really needs no directions or explaining. All you need is a picture frame and your recipe. I think adding a mat elevates the framed recipes a little bit, and gives them a clean, crisp look. If you don’t want to use the original recipe, you may want to just scan it, adjust the size, then print it out and frame it. Another fun idea may be to print a scanned copy of the recipe for family members, frame each copy and give them away as gifts (along with the cooked/baked recipe!) – a fun holiday gift idea! What are your favorite family recipes? I would love to know! Thank you so much for stopping by today, I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your week!