Handwritten Recipes: Excerpts From A Post-Apocalyptic Cookbook

 Have you ever looked for a recipe online, only to find yourself scrolling past a long personal story about the origin and meaning of the recipe before you even get to the ingredients? Handwritten Recipes: Excerpts From A Post-Apocalyptic Cookbook is a story told through those recipe introductions.

Available in the absolutely massive anthology Grandpa's Deep-Space Diner (seriously y'all, it's over 600 pages long), Handwritten Recipes weaves together stories about the main character's family with her own apocalyptic journey to see her grandmother and finally learned how to make all of the recipes that have been passed down over the generations.

The entire idea of the story is about how surviving isn't enough. Sometimes you need to thrive, sometimes you need to treat yourself even though you're struggling to make ends meet. It's about how putting in a little extra work to make a good meal instead of getting something cheap and premade and easy can make a difference in the way you feel.

That theme came easy to me. I come from several generations of people who pride themselves on being cheap, and even when I have money, it's a struggle to splurge on something nice for myself. But it is important and it does make all the difference sometimes. It's the difference between feeding the stomach and feeding the soul, to quote my main character's grandmother.

I don't have a lot of personal stories about family recipes and traditions. The one recipe that does have a story, it's not even the entire recipe:

My uncle Bob made an amazing pot roast. Everyone loved it. So my mom asked for his recipe and she made it, and apparently it was good but it was not Bob's Pot Roast. She asked him what she did wrong, and went over how she made it, and he remembered another ingredient that he forgot to tell her last time.

She tried again. Still not right. Every time she asked him about it, he remembered more ingredients. She was convinced he was doing it on purpose to avoid giving out his recipe, and she isn't sure she ever got the full list of ingredients during his lifetime. She still calls it Bob's Pot Roast, but it's not.

There are no actual recipes in Handwritten Recipes, just stories and advice about surviving and thriving and feeding the soul.

Contains mentions of death, and the end of the world.

Pick up your copy of Grandpa's Deep-Space Diner here.