My husband and I visited with his parents this past weekend, and my mother-in-law gave me her most-loved cookbooks and their stories. When she was pregnant with my husband, her first child, she took the bus to downtown Detroit where she bought the Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook. She learned to cook with it, and it has her special recipe for stuffed cabbage leaves. Which I will, unfortunately, probably never cook, as her son hates cabbage. Oh, well.

The Good Housekeeping Cook Book has her favorite recipe for meatballs, which is also my husband’s favorite recipe. It calls for 2 T. of parsley. When he tried to approximate it a few years ago, he put in “some” parsley. I think a lot more than 2 T. I am hoping the original recipe will yield meatballs that do not make it seem that you can taste the grass that the cows enjoyed during their pasturing.

And, since Mom is coming home from the rehab center tonight, and my work schedule will be changing so that I’ll arrive home before she does in the afternoons – at least for awhile – I’ll have plenty of time to read through these, try some some new/old recipes, and make a lot of meatballs.