THE NOTEBOOK

I still see my mother sitting at the kitchen table copying out her favorite recipes from the Women’s Weekly magazine. With pen in hand, she’d carefully write the recipe, word for word in her notebook. There are hundreds that she collected over the decades. That notebook, with its dog-eared pages, crusty stains and side notes, is now in my hands. The thing is, I don’t cook— my other half is the chef in our family. Now and then, he’ll ask me for Mom’s notebook to try one of her secret recipes, although he likes to add his own twist to it— it needs a bit of spice, he says. But nobody beats Mom’s cooking!