Joy from the Little Imperfctions

I have a lot of low-budget community cookbooks. Most of them are at least professionally bound with a plastic spiral, but St. John's Joys (St. John's Episcopal Church, Gig Harbor, Washington, undated, but probably late '70s/ early '80s since one recipe credits the source as a cookbook originally published in 1978) is even lower budget than that. It's clearly put together by hand. The pages are just hole-punched and tied together with a couple bits of cord.

There is just no way I could resist something so homespun.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the recipes also have a homespun quality. 

I'm glad somebody went back and made sure that cooks knew to add sugar to the turtle cookies! Those would not be so great without the sugar.... (I'm also wondering what makes them "turtle." I thought they'd need caramel and pecans to get that designation, but that's not the case here. Maybe being cooked on a waffle iron is supposed to make them roughly turtle-shaped somehow?)

Other recipes might still need similar corrections.

Or maybe I'm just a weirdo for thinking that Granola-Prune Bread should probably have some prunes in it. 

Every community has its favorite recipes, but I was a little confused about why some garnered so much attention. Judy's Chili Cheese Cubes showed up not just once...

...but FOUR times! I'm sure the little cheesy egg cubes are a fine appetizer, but giving the same recipe four times seems a bit excessive. (Okay, two of them were because my booklet accidentally included the page twice, but that doesn't hurt my thesis that people were not always paying attention when this got put together.)

Then again, math didn't seem to be a strong suit at St. John's either. 

Combine the first nine ingredients and spread them on English muffin halves. Of course, there are only eight ingredients total IF we include the muffins, so... ? 

Even if things don't always quite make sense, the book does live up to its name, as St. John's Joys was a joy to read.