Granny has been collecting recipes for a really long time…like over 60 years long. Around 2012, Granny decided to put together her own collection of her favorite and most-used to send to her kids and grandkids. She painstakingly clipped and arranged them onto pages, then photocopied and placed them into three-ring binders. Inside, she left a note expressing her desire that this be a “living” cookbook–that we should continue to add to it as we find (and create) recipes our families enjoy. On the front, she wrote, “Easterling Family Recipes”.
I feel that I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you just a little about this remarkable woman. Two things become very apparent almost as soon as you meet Granny: she loves to cook, and she lives to help people. For many years, she ran the Wednesday night suppers at her church. She came up with the menu, bought the ingredients, and helped prepare the food for hundreds of people. Granny, funded by several of the local churches, also ran a soup kitchen for the less fortunate in her community. Along with her employer, a local family doctor, she helped to established a mission in Honduras to provide care and medicine to people who otherwise had little or no access. And a few times a week, she would make some muffins or the like and head out to visit the “shut-ins” from her church: elderly folks that had lost the ability to leave their homes. Granny, in her late 80’s at the time of this writing, has handed off the church suppers, soup kitchen, and mission, but she still visits the shut-ins, bringing them joy, conversation, and, of course, a little something to eat.
In early 2019, I had a hankering for one of Granny’s recipes (I think it was Squash Fritters… sooo good). As I was flipping and scanning trying to locate it, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if this thing had a search bar?” A few days later, I was Googling a recipe for pizza sauce that I’d used several times, and each time I had to go find it (and, of course, scroll through all of the ad space, uh, I mean the accompanying article). And I thought, “Man, I wish I had a place that I could save these recipes…just the recipes…so I don’t have to do this every single time.” Shortly thereafter, I realized that there was a simple solution to both, and EasterlingFamilyRecipes.com was born.
After a few months of hand-jamming recipes, I was finally ready to show Granny. When I did, she smiled and told me she loved it. I asked, “So you’re okay with our cookbook being out there for everyone to see?” She leaned over and said, “Of course! Great recipes are meant to be shared.”
So again, welcome to Easterling Family Recipes! I am very happy to be able to share this labor of love with you, and from Granny to me to you, I sincerely hope that you find something in these pages that you and your family will enjoy as much as we do.
Tim the Younger is from a little town in South Carolina. After over a decade of moving around at the whims of the Marine Corps, he finally settled down in Kentucky. He spends his days developing apps and tools as a business intelligence engineer. His hobbies include cooking (well, yeah), reading, and learning about things that he will never have a use for but finds interesting all the same. And like everyone else, he writes his bio in the third-person.
Easterling Family Recipes 