"Recipes Just Have To Taste Good"

One of my favorite magazines is called 'Cook's Country.' There are two fabulous things about it: One, there are old, heirloom recipes included. And two, there is a whole team of cooks who try out dozens of different ways of cooking and baking things until they have found the perfect combination of ingredients, meaning we readers are guaranteed satisfaction. The founder and editor, Christopher Kimball, writes great introductions, and I want to share the newest one with you all because it spoke to me:

"An egg-rolling contest may seem old fashioned, even archaic, but in the country, the line between past and present is thankfully faint. Every summer, our family still attends the Washington County Fair, where I check over the blue-ribboned glass bottles of silage, the summer squash monsters, the cake and pie exibits, and all the rest: pole climbing, log hauling, rock throwing, baby crawling, and hog calling.
So when folks say that traditions have been lost to the past, well, they just don't know where to look.
It's easy to look at the past and think of it as quaint or somehow separated from the present. Sure, I grew up with neighbors who still baked cookies, biscuits, and bread in a wood cookstove and who remember to this day how to use a side hill plough and are apt to say that they prefer horses to tractors, since 'You always know that a horse is going to start up on a cold morning.'
But around the dinner table, there are no modernists. Green Bean Casserole is still the most requested recipe in America. New or old, recipes just have to taste good.
So for those who still love to cook-and I mean really love the cooking, not just the eating-it's nice to know that some things never change."