- Dec 16, 2025
Updated: Dec 18, 2025
NOTE FROM JAN ~ Closing out my 2025 Creativity Challenge is this month's guest blogger, Michele (Everts) Wills. Michele and I went to elementary school together and our moms were good friends. That was long, loooooong ago. So what a delight to catch up with her again on-line. Please enjoy Michele's post about special ways to preserve family memories while also creating in the kitchen. (P.S. Look for my Creativity Challenge to continue into 2026.) Cheers ~ Jan
AND NOW, TASTE YOUR MEMORIES WITH MICHELE WILLS ~ My three siblings and I were raised in the small town of Caro in mid-Michigan's "Thumb." My parents owned a pharmacy and a Hallmark Card and Gift shop and worked long hours. From the time when I was about ten years old, I would call my mom after school and ask her what was for supper. She would tell me what she had planned, what ingredients to use and how to generally make the meal. There were some mistakes, to be sure, but overall, we usually had tasty suppers.
The majority of the recipes I made were not written down anywhere, just truly "from scratch" cooking. One of the first recipes I intentionally recreated was a dessert made by my paternal grandmother, Nellie Everts, called "Birds Nest" (sort of an upside-down apple cobbler). I had never seen her use a written recipe. After learning that Grandma’s memory was failing, I asked her to tell me how she made it. She told me the ingredients and approximate measurements, which helped me to replicate that recipe. Grandma was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease shortly after that and passed away in 1983. Shortly after that, I made the Birds Nest for my dad. He was amazed when he tasted it, and I have been thankful ever since that I took the time to talk with Grandma. I would say that the Birds Nest was the beginning of my interest in recreating recipes from very little information or a written recipe.
Some years later, Mom gifted my siblings and me a typewritten, leather 3-ring binder with many of our family recipes. There were a few recipes from her mother, Grandma Helen, and her husband, our Grandpa Randy, which they had handwritten especially for the family cookbook. What makes this cookbook so special is that not only did it contain our most loved recipes, but it was a labor of love because each cookbook was hand typed on an electric typewriter! One of the foibles of this cookbook is that each version contains typos, most of which do not affect the recipe. However, one recipe in my version of the cookbook was found to contain a significant error.
One year our mom made a maraschino cherry-filled cookie for a Christmas cookie exchange. (She thought anyone offering “No Bake” cookies were slackers.) This cookie quickly became a beloved family favorite. A poinsettia shaped cookie cutter is used and 3 holes are punched in the middle so that the pretty red cherry filling could show through. Whenever I tried to make these cookies using the recipe in my cookbook, the cherry filling was always runny. I tried several times and failed each time, which was upsetting to me. This continued failure led to my brother becoming the designated baker of these cookies. We finally discovered that my mom made a typo in my cookbook. The amount of cornstarch was off by a tablespoon, and I was vindicated!
With the holidays now in full swing, I share a family recipe we call “Grape Salad” or “Christmas Salad.” I have no knowledge where it originated, but Grape Salad has been eaten at our family’s Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays for as long as I can remember. This salad is actually more of a dessert and is very simple, using only 4 main ingredients: seedless red grapes, pineapple tidbits, mini marshmallows and whipped cream (the real stuff only). A fond memory is that during the 2+ hour road trips to go to family holiday dinners, mom would sit in the car, working to halve and de-seed the grapes as there were no seedless grapes available at that time. What a mess, but it had to be done so the grapes and pineapple could sufficiently drain. The heavy cream would be sweetened and whipped at the last minute, just before serving to ensure that it was as fresh as possible. Any remaining Grape Salad was highly coveted to accompany the obligatory turkey sandwich and other leftovers later in the day.
Working full time in the health profession, being active with our daughters as they were growing up, teaching at the university level and obtaining my MBA at age 52, put my thoughts about researching recipes on the back burner. Retiring in late 2024, my husband and I sold our home and a majority of our collective life's belongings. We now divide our time in a lovely, much smaller condo in a golf community in Florida and a small cottage in Michigan on Lake Huron. Thoughts of a blog had been floating in my head for a couple of years, and finally, in late 2025 my cooking/food blog, "Taste Your Memories," was established. Through my blog, I hope to help other folks enrich their memories of family by recreating some of their favorite missing-in-action recipes and passing them down once again.
My own family continues to enjoy time together, building new memories, in and out of the kitchen.
Recipes, including those for Grape Salad, Poinsettia Cookies, and Mimi's Apple Pie, can be found on my blog site. In addition, if you have any memories of favorite family foods for which you have only a few ingredients, or perhaps no recipe at all, you can also contact me about this through my blog site (see bottom button).
You can also find me at:
Of, if you prefer email, please reach out to me at michelewills857@hotmail<dot>com.
I would love to hear from you and help you “taste your memories.” ~ Michele
CLOSING NOTE FROM JAN ~ Thank you for supporting my creative adventures this year. Your reading, reviewing, and sharing word-of-mouth book love has meant more than I can tell you in this crazy, heart-wrenching, wonderful world of publishing. I appreciate you and love to hear from you, especially if you care to tell me about your own creative journey or ghostly encounter(s). Or both! Please reach out any time.
- Feb 19, 2018
Former journalist Bill Moyers is credited with saying, “Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.” Steven Jobs, the late CEO of Apple, put another spin on it when he said, "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.”
Here’s my take on it: I love connecting things! It can energize me…or calm me. Certainly it provides me with a sense of well-being and personal growth. One of the favorite parts of my job as a nonprofit fundraiser is the connective aspect of sharing client stories in ways that I hope can resonate with potential funders.
Yet more and more, today’s funders want data and logic models and indicators and evaluation plans. The work world of the new millennium is focused on improving processes—and being able to prove it with data. Quality improvement … Lean … Six Sigma. These are data-driven processes for organizations to attain a measure of quality near perfection. There’s that word again: data. Apparently data matters.
The artist Picasso is attributed with saying, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” Boy, do I feel that! Especially in this world of data-mining. I feel the creative aspects of my day job being squeezed out constantly to make room for easier-to-measure data and metrics. Lucky for me I can choose how I spend my time outside work to pursue whatever creative outlets I’d like. Our children, though, do not have that choice. I worry for them. In these test-centric, extracurricular-crammed times, when’s a kid supposed to get creative?
Sir Kenneth Robinson raises this question more eloquently and with the data to back him. He’s written books about how creativity is undervalued and ignored in Western culture and our educational systems. Sir Ken’s talk entitled "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" has become the most watched TED talk of all time.
His concerns are backed by scientific studies. Dr. Kyung Hee Kim with William and Mary has been studying the decline in creativity in U.S. children for years. Her research links to studies surrounding the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT), an evidence-based, science-driven assessment created in the 1950s. Close to 3,000 individuals—or “Torrance kids”—have been part of the TTCT studies tracking creativity in the U.S. from the 1960s to the present.
And guess what? While America's IQ scores are on the rise, the country's scores on creative thinking have been declining since 1990. This is especially evident in younger children from kindergarten through sixth grade. Seems our ability to recite facts may be at an all-time high. But what about our passion and ability to ponder original ideas and make connections?
Creativity matters. But it involves taking risks. How different would today’s world be without the creative tenacity of Galileo, who was condemned for sharing astronomical findings that went against Catholic theology of the time? Or Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who was fired for raising the notion that infections could be spread by germs on doctors’ hands? Or philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for daring to propose that the universe might be infinite.
So here’s my wish for today’s children. May you continue to study your science and do your math, read your literature and mine that data. BUT…may you NEVER stop thinking differently out of fear of being ridiculed. May you NEVER lose your curiosity because you’re too busy being “taught to the tests” in school. And may you NEVER, EVER stop piercing the mundane to find the marvelous!
