Mostly stuff grandma didn't make, and one big surprise

Today, I'm posting something very special to me. I inherited my grandma's recipe box. Here is a view of the side, which had a fruit bowl print (repeated on both sides).

Here is the front, which is pretty similar. 

Most exciting of all, this had a flip-up top that could hold a recipe card while the cook... well... cooked.

And for the maybe three readers who don't know me personally, no need for too many condolences. My grandma was 102, heartily sick of everything, and cranky AF. I loved her dearly and miss her, but she was READY to go. (And if you've ever wondered where I get my delightful personality, there's a big clue. 😆)

I wasn't really sure what to expect in the recipe box because I rarely saw grandma use a recipe. She just made stuff. (Again, kinda like me.) When I dug through the recipes, very little seemed familiar. She often had multiple copies of recipes that I don't remember her making even once, like Bisquick's Impossible Lasagna Pie (which made another appearance as "Lasagna Squares").

Or Zippy Zucchini (which had the same name for each appearance).

The Zesty Carrot Salad was stained up enough that I think she probably made it at some point, though I have no recollection of it.

I am not at all surprised to see that she had a variation for an oil-free version, though. Grandpa had heart trouble and this was from the low-fat era. Back then, subbing in Karo syrup was the "healthy" variation.

I saw multiple recipes for things she definitely made, but these are not for the actual versions she made. For instance, I found two recipes for cranberry salad, and NEITHER is the one she made for holidays. This first version doesn't even have Jell-O, and grandma's version was Jell-O based.

The next one has gelatin, but it's missing key ingredients like crushed pineapple and orange juice concentrate.

(If you want to see the recipe my grandma actually used, S.S. from A Book of Cookrye made it a few months ago. It was definitely not in this box.)

Grandma also had a couple recipes for cutout sugar cookies. She made cutouts for Christmas every year (and often randomly at other times too). I still use that same recipe every December and know it's not either of the ones from the recipe box.

I can't really imagine grandma buying cake flour or having cream on hand (well, once they stopped owning dairy cows, anyway...). Weird that she had a recipe calling for these ingredients. (And her version uses both almond extract AND vanilla. It's not a "choose one" scenario.)

Her recipe doesn't use confectioners' sugar or butter, either, so I know this isn't the origin of the cookies she actually made.

My favorite thing about this recipe is the ad on the back for "Mood Watch Ladies."

The ad notes that buyers can use Master Charge to buy this monstrosity, so that dates the recipe to sometime between 1969 and 1979.

But I did find one recipe that I remembered very well, and it kind of choked me up that it was so stained. Grandma must have used it. So you're getting the story whether you want to know it or not, just because I want to tell it.

The summer between high school and college, I moved in with grandma and grandpa. One day when I didn't have to work (I was a cook for a nursing home), they had to go somewhere in the morning and would be home around lunch time. Grandma asked me if I could have lunch ready when they got back and told me to use the ground turkey she had in the fridge. I decided to make up a recipe, and when they got home, my grandpa ate three servings at lunch. He was a man of few words (and generally preferred dessert to anything else), so that was about the highest compliment he could pay. Grandma asked me to write down the recipe so she could make it again.

If you can't read the title, it's "Guidelines for [blank]'s Casserole." (The blank is my real name. I blotted it out, but "Casserole" is nearly unreadable for some reason.) Neither grandma nor I were particularly careful about following recipes and I hadn't really measured anything when I made it anyway, so "guidelines" seemed right for the title.

I had pretty much forgotten about that day until I found this, and I can't believe how clearly I remember it decades later. It's like grandma left me one last present hidden amid all the recipes that I don't remember her making.