Many of you own cookbooks with helpful hints on the pages used as dividers or section separators. Some of you may have found this hints indispensable and some of you may have ignored them completely. Well if you have a wonderful household tip from your mother or even your grandmother but all means included it your cookbook.What a great gift for a family member to read it 25 years from now or even 50 years into the future.

If you want to have hint section to have real use you may have to do some research since things are always changing in the kitchen. Now we do not microwave with plastic wrap or even plastic container. We have separate cutting boards for our raw chicken. We wash our hands after touching chicken. My grandmother at a time did not even have running water in her kitchen

As someone I know said,  "just wait and what we do will be wrong again." Coffee and Chocolate are good for you now. Green-tea does not lower blood pressure but hibiscus does. My recent reading gave me a clue that a lot of what we know or believe might be changing. One article stated that over 80,000 chemicals that we use today have never been tested for their harmful effects. Soft plastics are still bared in Canada and Europe. In fact, Europe does not allow for many of our bio-engineered food in to their countries for sale. If they are not good enough for them maybe we should be concerned. These altered foods may be killing harmful bacteria but it could be killing things we do not know about that could show up being harmful to us.

I think we need to go back to Grandma's original way of cooking. Locally grown foods where you know the name of the producer. You know that it is fresh and at peak time has the best flavors and tastes. If you do not have those old cookbooks you can create them with the help of many on line recipes.

Personally, I would not add tips since they can change so quickly in there usefulness but I would put a chart for food substitutes. So if the recipe called for buttermilk and you did not have any, what could you put in exchange of the buttermilk to give the same tastes. And there are many available on the web too. But like all things you put into your cookbook..test and taste them. So remember that helpful hints are in the eyes to the beholder. Keep your cookbook as useful as possible.