This is the space where I’ve collected the recipes I’ve created myself, some heritage recipes from family members and other paragons of Midwestern cookery, and some recipes I just want to find quickly and put my own spin on. The old family recipes are classics. My own recipes are born of sheer crazy experimentation. Measuring utensils are often neglected.

A few notes on the “heritage” recipes: I inherited my mom’s recipe card box. It had a lot of stuff I frankly weeded out — clips from magazines or cardboard boxes and some truly nefarious-looking remnants of the 1970s and 1980s. I also kept a lot, particularly the ones credited to family members and some that just looked like they were worth hanging on to. I also went through my old church cookbook and pulled some Midwestern “classics” from there. In some cases, I retained some of the period ingredients (i.e., margarine, oleo, Crisco) — but a lot of times, I just modernized these to use butter.

I’m currently going through a phase of trying to use fewer processed ingredients. That’s partially to do with current (2020s) trends in cookery, as well as my ulcerative colitis diagnosis. I can’t digest maltodextrin or alcohol sugars, which rules out a lot of processed foods. (But boy, does that rule out a lot of the stuff I ate as a kid!)

I started organizing my recipes on a wiki and I’m in the process of moving them all here. Hopefully, this site will be a more attractive place for sharing recipes with friends, and will stick around for a long time (I’m a little dubious about the future of my old wiki server). After putting together more than 300 pages of recipes, I’d hate to see them all disappear when a third-party service abandons its product!

Well, that’s probably enough navel-gazing. It’s time to get to the recipes!

If you like that this space doesn’t have any ads, please consider a tip of $5 or more at ko-fi.com/annemck. Your contribution will help cover the fees for maintaining this site. Thank you!