A bout of inspiration

Using the internet to find recipes is wonderful, yes? Well for some reason I recently decided that reading recipes on the internet, while great and convenient, was not enough for me. I wanted a more personalized experience for my recipe-reading. And I was hit with inspiration on how I wanted to do it in a very (for me) unexpected place: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, a.k.a HSP, a.k.a. my own darn workplace.

I recently had the delight of looking through Martha Washington's cookbook while helping out at HSP’s Young Friends open house in December. I was blown away by the intricacy of this little book, and fascinated at the simple beauty in writing down recipes that are important to you. So, I tried it out myself. Behold: The first page of Briana Giasullo’s Cookbook.

Pictured recipe: Date Night Rigatoni with Sausage and Kale from Pinch of Yum

Don’t mind the writos and messy design, please. This was all done rather quickly and on a whim, remember. But it was fun! And while I can’t take credit for creating this recipe or most likely any of the others that’ll end up in my cookbook, I will take care to credit the people and websites from where the recipes originated. However, my written accounts of them will be altered to fit the way I made the recipe, which in most cases means the ingredients are slightly changed (mostly to eliminate meat since I am a vegetarian) or the measurements are slightly changed (mostly to eliminate them completely because I prefer to cook by sight/smell/feel/taste/etc. rather than by measuring, which as you can imagine gets mixed results).

This is all in part because I don’t paint or draw as much as I used to and have instead taken to cooking as my creative outlet, so I guess now I’d like to combine them into one grand creative experience, if you will. Eventually I’d like to have a nice little recipe book with all my favorites, plus comments on why they ended up in such a prestigious place as my own personal cookbook. Hope you enjoy.