Doris Market, Fort Lauderdale, for Yummy Meatballs and Handmade Pasta

I'm fast becoming a fan of Doris Market for Italian specialty items, meat, and fresh food.

In the prepared foods display, the meatballs are big, have just the right of meatiness, nicely seasoned and flavorful.

I hate rolling meat between my hands, so buying handmade when it's this good is a plus.

When it comes to Fort Lauderdale things-to-do and places to eat, if your hotel room has a microwave, you can do worse than pick up some prepared food from the Doris Market case to enjoy a nice meal ensuite.

I also tried the handmade pasta in one of the cooler cases, and I will never want to go back to the dry kind. It melts in my mouth with a creamy delicious taste.

In the meat department,I found a meat loaf package with ground veal, ground pork and ground beef that I can use for my own meat loaf recipe. I got mine decades ago when I used to type recipes from Miss Josephine Vasto, a prolific provider of delicious homemade foods at the Albany Times-Union back in the day.

Miss Vasto was a type of ethnic lady we don't see much anymore: unmarried herself but she doted on cooking for her nieces and nephews.

I also found some rosemary-cheese sausage on sale that looks good. Possible recipes include grilling this with peppers and onions and eating on a savory baguette or enjoying with more of that handmade pasta.

I would have expected to pay $10-$20 more for the same amount of meat products and other food where I usually shop, The Fresh Market, so I was pleasantly surprised by the check out price.

Fresh herbs were $1.50, same price as the farmer's market across the street. I rarely see fresh bay leaves or sage, so I was happy to snap up these. If you have recently moved to South Florida, add "find a farmer's market" for local produce to your list of Fort Lauderdale things-to-do.

In summary, if you live in Broward County and there's a Doris Market near you, I recommend the meatballs and fresh pasta.

Recipes Tell the Story of A Life

Most people save photographs.

I’ve kept a journal for some years.

A charming little book, Love, Loss, and What I Wore, documents a life with clothing. I gave that one to several friends and now, years later, it's a play.

I was caught unawares when culling and sorting my recipes turned into another route to Memory Lane.

Some of the earliest recipes are hand-written by people who no longer or rarely make the old Polish dishes.

Sandy Dykeman's banana cake recipe reminded me of high school and our early college time. I haven't seen her or made the recipe in decades. But I cannot throw it out, for I have no photos of her, and it is a memory worth having every once in a while.

Some of the recipes are from Cosmopolitan, the 1970s bible of liberated young career women. Sandy and I tried many of these. A recipe for shrimp, smothered in fresh summer tomatoes and goat cheese, is one I still use from time to time.

One of my early jobs in newspaper was typing recipes. Of those I saved, the paper has turned brown, and sometimes the letters have faded so nearly indistinct.

Here's a recipe for chicken cacciatore I made the first time I had my husband over for dinner. He was living with another woman, and she came too. I did not see our love affair coming. The memories are sprinkled with stardust. That recipe stays.

Quite a few recipes are from the healthy recipe books a Baltimore friend and I used. I remember bringing my own containers to buy different kinds of flour, rice, and yeast from tubs at the Sikh health food store. Is it still there, I wonder? I am pretty sure that the bins probably are no more.

Saturday was a wonderful day to visit the Baltimore markets, come home with my booty, drink wine, cook, and entertain. Many of these recipes are stained with ingredients from those times long past.

A few recipes are from gourmet cooking school. Reporters are no longer allowed to accept such freebies, but I learned a lot.

Some of these are keepers, especially the salad dressings.

I was wondering as I sorted through these if I had ever allowed myself the luxury of walnut oil for a salad dressing. I think I must try it, however expensive it may be. Then I see a notation of a Baltimore supermarket where I obviously bought it. I remember now, I tried it, and I was not as impressed as perhaps I ought to be.

Here are the recipes I cooked when we were poor – lots of beans and tortillas and casseroles and very little meat. There are some good soup and stew recipes among this lot, things I cook now and again.

There are recipes for things I no longer eat – veal and pork. A growing collection of salad and vegetable recipes as my preference has gone in that direction. I begged for the antipasto salad when I was a girl and my family sent out for pizza. I don't know where that craving came from, among my meat-and-potatoes relatives. I still embrace vegetables and increasingly the world does, too.

Sometimes I wonder at why I kept a recipe. Do I really need a instructions to make deviled eggs? Or herb chicken? These are dumped.

I haven't need instructions to whip up easy dishes -- pasta, omelettes, steak -- since the 1970s. It's always been about what's in the cupboard and what goes with what. I get two or three recipes for a dish from my cookbooks or the internet, compare the ingredients, and decide how I will do it. This comes from those years of typing recipes. I quickly saw that certain things go with other things and the many variations of a single dish. Perhaps I also have been blessed with a keen sense of smell. That helps, too.

I continue sorting and culling the dishes of times past, memories of people I have loved drifting through my fingers like fairy dust.