The Family Vault: A Collection of Recipes from the Kitchen of Carol Ruth Watson (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781489719638)

The author began her cooking adventure when she was 10 and living in Ft. Worth, Texas. Since that time she has lived in various parts of Texas and traveled some, but always stayed in the States. She married at 17, continued her senior year and graduated from Leon ISD. With her husband working away from home as a Merchant Marine, she reared their children to school age, then at the urging of her mother-in-law, attended nursing school and graduated in '74. She worked two jobs while juggling home and family and managed to save enough money for a down payment on a house in Corpus Christ, TX, where her husband worked. The family moved the day after Christmas, 1974, and she began working on January 3, 1975. On the Monday after Thanksgiving in 1979, she became paralyzed from the waist down and went through an extensive hospital and rehab stay to return home and begin a new chapter in her life as a single mother of two. The following year she enrolled in college and was blessed to graduate with both an AA and an AAS as a Laboratory Tech. It was four years before the hospital community decided that she could actually do the work she had been trained for, as no disabled person had ever actually been employed in the medical field there. In 1998, she retired and moved back to her grandmother's hometown and settled down on a little patch of heaven. In 2011, she knew just how she needed her kitchen, so she approached her brother who found his hammer and saw, and got crackin'. She now has a lovely and accessible kitchen, just like she always knew she wanted, and loves living in the country, sitting on the front porch drinking iced tea and watching the world pass by.