Recently I have been on a kick to make luscious caramel rolls I remember from after Church on Sunday at a friend’s house. Of course I have never had any luck with yeast, so when I read an idea for making rolls with thawed frozen bread dough, a light flipped on, of course why bother with yeast if you don’t need to right?

So after a couple of successful experiments and mostly success, I started thinking about how I do love the old favorites and what I have done to update them to my taste. Spaghetti is where I started. With my tomato abundance this summer I was able to make a lot of marinara. Ragu Mom’s old standard is nice, but how I love to cook my own.

Mom made spaghetti with browned ground beef, which we then drained and put into the crock pot with a half a jar of ragu, because of course you wouldn’t want to waste it. I like the old hamburger recipe, but with ground bison it is devine. I also like to make it with Italian sausage in place of the hamburger.

Another thing my mom always did was make meat balls. The gravy she made over the meat balls was always so good, I never asked her what it was but I suspect it was tomato sauce with some brown sugar because it was always ever so sweet. I just used up the last of the summer marinara today making meat balls.

She used minute rice in her meat balls, and some people swear by bread crumbs, but I just can’t call it a meat ball if it isn’t oat meal in the mix. This time I think I added a little too much oat meal but hey why not, something full of cholestorol mixed with something designed to bust cholestorol’s butt. Don’t forget the egg.

Mom alwayas made meat loaf with oat meal I don’t know how I didn’t notice the meat balls had rice in them. She always put ketchup on top of the meat loaf. My husband cannot eat things that with tomato, I have to invent some other way to do that. I was thinking of making a sauce of eggplant and mushrooms to put on top.

One thing I did well that I liked a lot was make eggplant pasta sauce. Just cooked down eggplants with garlic and shallets and mushrooms and then blended with a hand blender, or regular blender. I generally used the regular Italian seasonings oregano and basil at the end.

My lasagna is dressed up with ricotta spinach onions peppers, and jarred alfredo as well as the regular red ragu, and I have to have pepperoni and sasusage in my lasagna, a far cry from plain old hamburger and cheese layers, though that is still really good. When I make lasagna I freeze most of it, and then eat on it for weeks. I freeze two slices at a time in saran wrap and put it in groups into freezer bags.

I don’t have a chest freezer yet so I have gotten quite adept at taking broths from roasted chickens. I cool them down in the fridge overnight in a tupperware, preferreably something tall. Then in the morning I spoon off the fat that has filtereed to the top, and put it in a quart sized freezer bag, and lay it flat in the freezer, makes for awesome storage, but I genearlly lose the bag after

So what do you like to cook that your Mom or Dad used to make, and what updates have you given the recipes? Do your kids like it or do you make it just for you?