A recipe box comprehensive of recollections | Food

In a solitary instant, though looking through that recipe, I can be transported to Wooden Dale, Unwell., and my fifth-quality 12 months.

In excess of the next 34 decades, I gathered pretty a several far more cookie recipes. Some were being one particular-hit wonders, some others ended up very best not recurring, and a couple of were keepers. The recipes came from workplace parties, infant showers, Bunco group gatherings, e book club meetings, Scout picnics, swim workforce banquets and church potlucks, a sampling of the pit stops in my everyday living.

A handful are from my days as a younger reporter in South Florida in the early ’80s. Like most South Floridians, significantly adrift from families and traditions, I begged and borrowed new traditions and recipes, scribbled on torn out internet pages of a reporter’s notebook or on the backs of envelopes.

A person recipe from this era is a standout, although it has absolutely nothing to do with my tropical surroundings. It hails from Nebraska and a co-worker named Mona Z. Koppelman.

I never make this recipe each individual calendar year, but as I contemplate my yearly baking options I linger above the web page for “Fresh Snow on Plowed Ground” cookies and feel about Mona.

These cookies are magical. Made with a thick, sticky dim chocolate batter and sprinkled with powdered sugar, the cookie plumps up to appear like a best circle of plowed ground dusted with a trace of snow. As I recall, Mona explained the recipe came from her farm town of Winnetoon, Neb. (inhabitants 68). That sounded in particular magical to me as we cranked up the air conditioner to continue to keep the dough from melting in her Fort Lauderdale apartment.