Recipe Tea Towels

As anyone who's read this blog knows, I love cooking, love recipes, and love collecting things with recipes on them such as recipe postcards, recipe rubber stamps, and now, recipe tea towels. I stumbled upon these quite accidentally with an Anthropologie purchase of a pair of towels bearing a recipe for Irish Soda Bread.  It was close to St. Patrick's Day at the time, and I thought it would be a wonderful way to wrap rustic loaves of Irish Soda Bread to give as gifts.  It was, the recipients loved it!  Foolishly, I failed to photograph the towels, the bread wrapped up in the towels, or buy an extra one to keep for myself.  Lesson learned there.  Ever since this initial purchase, I now seem to find recipe tea towels everywhere.  I also consider them to be a most practical souvenir to pick up whenever we travel.  I don't know that I'll ever make any of the recipes, but I enjoy reading and displaying them.  Try to come up with ideas for their use on your own, and please share them with me.

Here are a few of my favorites. 

A nice assortment of Manx (Gaelic) recipes on a very colorful towel.

Here's a recipe for strudel...in Italian!

I love this towel with both English and Spanish versions of a recipe for Paella. I'm not going to use it as a towel though, but will fly it as a flag at our next Paella cooking bash. 

I love this cozy kitchen scene and recipe for Yorkshire Pudding.

I love everything about the newest addition to my collection from the recipe to the curtain blowing in the breeze from the open window to the table full of delicious looking scones.

This tea towel features Cornish recipes, some of them sound pretty good. I'll have to start a new series of blog posts of recipes I've tried that appear on tea towels!

This post is linked to:
Mosaic Monday - Little Red House
Metamorphosis Monday-BNOTP
Brag Monday-The Graphics Fairy
Motivate Me Monday-Keeping it Simple
Amaze Me Monday-Dittle Dattle
Thrifty Thursday-Tales from Bloggeritaville
100 Ideas Under $100-Beyond the Picket Fence
Show and Tell Saturday-Be Different Act Normal 
Fall in Love - Decor to Adore
Mouthwatering Monday
Seasonal Sunday

Scenic Salisbury Steak - Route 66 Postcard Recipe

I love food and I love to travel, so it's only natural that as a seasoned veteran I've learned to travel light going, and not weigh myself down with souvenirs returning; such items that will only end up stored away and forgotten over the course of time.  So, collecting recipe postcards satisfies my curiosity about local cuisines, provides me with an excellent remembrance of my trip, and a way to recreate the tastier part of it to share with friends once I get home.

Click on this recipe to enlarge it and make it readable.  The only change I made was to add a packet of dry onion soup mix to the sauce in order to give it a more complex, richer flavor.

Today's dinner came from a Route 66 postcard from a collection that I acquired locally at the Missouri History Museum.  I've made this any number of times and each time we've throughly enjoyed this tasty meal of comfort food, and a bit of local history.

Served on an Inca Restaurantware (something else I collect) grill plate to be extra authentic.

I have a bit of a funny story about this recipe.  When I was recovering from an illness, my husband offered to make dinner.  Now he is an excellent chef, so something simple like this would normally pose no problem.  But, he is also a scholar and professor emeritus, who is constantly involved in one project or other and, well to be blunt, is the typical absent-minded professor.  When it came time to serve the meal he put before me the biggest piece of Salisbury steak I'd ever seen. I looked at him and said, "Oh, you made meat loaf!  I can't eat a whole meatloaf." He denied this and said it was the Salisbury steak recipe that I'd given him. Ummm, no, I'd made it before and it never looked anything like this rather challenging mound of meat.

I looked in the baking dish and asked where the other patties were.  "Others?" he asked.  "There were no others, the recipe said to 'form in 2 patties'."

I stared at him, mouth agape.  "No," I said, in my most diplomatic voice.  "You would not turn one and a half pounds of ground beef into two patties.  No."

He continued to insist, so I pulled out the recipe and as I read it a smile crossed my face.  The recipe read "form into patties."  INTO not TWO.  But knowing my dear husband as I do I'm sure he was involved in a number things at the time he read the recipe, his thoughts elsewhere.  And as he was working, repeated to himself "form into patties...form into pattie...form in two patties" and that's how he ended up with Salisbury meat loaves instead of Salisbury steak.

We laugh about this to this day.  As it turned out, the meatloaf thing wasn't half bad.  We froze one and split the other and both meals were equally delicious.

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