Cooking Again...

Amazing how after 60 years of COOKING you get tired of it, BUT you don't get tired of EATING! It's been a long time since I've eaten Swedish Meatballs-a favorite of mine whenever we visited IKEA in SLC. But out closest IKEA is in Las Vegas which is about 1.5 hours of freeway traffic from here. So I decided I would try cooking my own meatballs. Unfortunately I didn't have a RECIPE but did have a cookbook of Swedish recipes and a laptop. https://therecipecritic.com/the-best-swedish-meatballs/ 

Years ago I was married to a Swede who was an amazing cook but I never helped make or even write down his recipe for meatballs. Now he is no longer with us having died of cancer many years ago. I thought how hard could it be to make MEATBALLS! So here is a photo essay of my journey. 

You need ground pork w/o spices, eggs, bread crumbs and

onions being  chopped by my helpful hubby

then comes the gooey part mixing it all together with your hands

Forming meatballs to fry reminds me of pottery class

After meatballs are browned then you bake them to finish cooking

Time to boil potatoes, mash, make gravy and add meatballs

Delicious over mashed potatoes, only missing lignonberries

Back to the FUTURE

 And the PRESENT full of new adventures or challenges each day. LOVE seeing photos of my cute GREAT GRAND CHILD Gabby who just get cuter every day though I haven't seen her since April or so. She is growing bigger, crawling around and wanting to stand up. Thanks to others in the family that are taking photos so I'm not missing all her cuteness.

Getting more mobile will keep her parents busy!

What a sweet smile, she's a cutie!

She loves to swing, don't we all?

Checking out the local dinosaur museum, he looks real!

Ghosts from the Past

Today I received in an email a photo from 1965 when I was a teacher of dance at BYU. It came from the International Folk Dancers alumni committee chair who is collecting old photos to preserve. I had never seen this photo before and somehow it amazed me as I looked upon myself as a very young 24 years newly married wife standing next to my handsome recently returned missionary who served for 2.5 years for our Church in Brazil. I was teaching dance at BYU while he was working on his masters in Drama. No children had been born to our family. Little did I know what life held in the future. 

Now 56 years later, I can look with compassion on my innocence and lack of experience which life would take care of with three sons, travels to Wisconsin, Brazil and then California-teaching dance and trying to hold my marriage together as my spouse warped in a real hippie 1970s style. I survived, got divorced returned to Utah, married a man from Sweden, had another son, and became an elementary school teacher then a librarian. But life CHANGES were not over after another divorce, I would married again and move to Roosevelt Utah, retiring from teaching and being a librarian to fill my life with writing and publishing family histories.  An amazing trip that I could not have even imagined when I was 24 years old and now I am 81  and a grandma and great grandma wondering what the next stage of life will bring.