Trying To Learn New Tricks

For most of April, I’ve been moonlighting.

With encouragement from my boss, I’ve been trying to learn a few new tricks – called Illustrator and Photoshop. And since I can’t lie within this authentic space, I must say, it’s a miracle I haven’t pulled every newly coiffed hair out of my head.

Learning new tricks at my age is nothing short of painful. And frustrating beyond imagination.

However, I was able to compile this object d’ art. It’s a scanned copy of a hand-written recipe from my Grandma Helen – and one that surely came from the old country – and a photo of her younger self. The reason it’s so endearing and mostly unusual, the recipe is written on an envelope.

Of course, to G-ma Helen, there was no waste, so the unused envelope seemed a perfectly legitimate vehicle to transcribe a recipe upon. And she didn’t give a hoot once she ran out of room top to bottom, left to right, if she had to turn and write along the edge of the envelope.

The following image is my homage to my new skills (I’m using that word very loosely), my dear, sweet Grandma Helen and her delicious Potica (paw-TEET’-tzah) recipe from the Christmases of my past.

{My grandma used to come visit us in California every Christmas from her home outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She would often lament how “spoiled” my sister and I were when we didn’t eat all of our dinner. In fact, as a child of the Depression Era, she never wasted a morsel. Not one. Prior to dumping dishes into the sink for their proper scalding, she would eat every last bite off our plates. Oh, we’d laugh at her in our snotty, childish way, but damn, she was a wise woman.}

Since I couldn’t completely decipher the envelope recipe to include herein, I found one similar from Better Homes & Gardens  if you are interested in some good, old-fashioned Russian baked treats!

Not bad for an old dog.