Part 1.
I will describe both my current family (me and my husband who I have lived with for five years) and my family that I grew up with (myself and my grandmother). Me and my husband are photographers and we end up taking a lot of artistic photos and photos of ourselves while we are traveling. These photos are digital and we also use film cameras. Like many people, a lot of our digital photos sit in computer files and we only look at the every so often. The photos we take that get developed or are Polaroid photos end up getting put on the wall. I am usually the one that makes scrapbooks out of the photos and my husband is the one who will tape them on to the wall. Most often we look through the digital photos while we are looking for a specific photo in the digital files. Then we might start looking at images and remembering vacations. The photos we had when I was growing up were usually put away in the attic and my grandmother look care of those. Usually the photos were only accessed when I was purposefully looking through them for something specific (like the digital photos). The oldest photos I can remember is from the 1940s but there could be some that are much older. Me and my grandmother might only look at photos when we are in the attic for some other reason. So in both situations (digital and film) I only end up looking for photos when there is some other reason I would be going through them, like looking for something in a box or looking for a specific image for a project. Typically, in my family growing up we would only remember people and events in the context of a certain event. So while having a holiday dinner we might remember something that happened at a previous holiday dinner. Thinking back I’m not sure we connected stories or events to specific objects or had many photos up around the house.
Part 2.

I posted four photos. One is a photo of me and my husband when we got married at the Oregon coast and a landscape photo from the same day. The second set of photos is from a road trip we took to explore central Oregon and northern California. The picture was taken on a hike by a waterfall outside of Bend, Oregon and I included a photo of the waterfall the photo was taken in front of as well. When I was examining the photos we have I found that since it was just the two of us together a lot of the time when we were taking photos, most of the photos are of landscapes or just one of us. These were one of only a few photos I could find of the two of us together. Both of us remembered the photos being taken at different times during the course of each of the events. I thought the photo of us on our wedding day was taken before the ceremony and he thought it was taken afterward. Even though this is just a small difference in time, it does seem to represent that photos will recall events differently for people who have set up the time-line for an event differently in their mind even though we sometimes think of photos as fixed images. The same is true of the photograph by the waterfall which I thought took place at the start of the road trip, but Adam was able to demonstrate with the time stamp on the image that it took place at the end of the road trip thus demonstrating one of the benefits of digital.
Part 3.
Grandma Grunthaner’s Peanut Butter Cookies
Sift: ½ cup brown sugar and ½ cup granulated sugar
beat until soft: ½ cup butter
Add in the sugar gradually and blend these ingredients until they are creamy.
Beat in: 1 egg, 1 cup peanut butter*, ½ tsp salt, ½ tsp baking soda
sift before measuring: 1 ½ cups bread flour (I just use all purpose)
add the flour to the batter and: ½ tsp vanilla
Roll the dough into small balls. Place them on a greased (I use ungreased) tin. Press them flat with a fork. Bake them in a moderate oven, 375 degrees, for about 15 minutes.
*Do not use the natural peanut butter that is good for you. THE COOKIES WON’T TASTE RIGHT. Skippy Crunchy works best. The easiest way to measure the peanut butter is to put, say ½ cup of water in a Pyrex measuring cup and then add peanut butter until the water reaches the marker for the amount of peanut butter PLUS ½ cup. Pour out the water before you add the peanut butter!!

This is a recipe from my great-grandmother. My aunt sent it out at the holidays with a letter about the recipe. One part of her letter read “Also, while you may be wondering why I am passing this recipe on to you, it is because it is the only Worland family recipe worth passing on.” She goes on to comment on recipes made with cold hotdogs and Velveeta cheese etc. I personally never got to experience any of the recipes with Velveeta and grew up eating a very different type of diet since my grandmother I lived with cooked differently and when my father would cook he was very health conscious. After I got this letter in the mail I made a batch of the cookies and shared them with co-workers. I also sent the aunt that sent me the recipe a Polaroid of the finished product. I don’t have much interaction with this aunt who lives in Virginia so it was a way to communicate with her about a family recipe which she thought I would be interested in because I bake quite a bit. When I am cooking with my husband, especially for larger holidays, he always cooks the main course and side dishes and I make the dessert. We usually are alternating who is in the kitchen working on the different parts of the meal. Typically whenever I have been in a living situation where we cook a lot I am responsible for the dessert and so I am in the kitchen by myself either before, during or after the main preparations and eating of the meal getting that ready. Before thinking about this exercise I had never really noticed that before, but there is usually a large group of people involved in the preparations for the main meal while I am engaged in a different routine preparing the dessert.

Part 4.
I would be interested in making a documentary about the recipe I shared above that my aunt sent out to several family members including me. I would look in to exactly how many people she sent it out to and choose maybe ten of them to follow in their process of making the cookies. The characters would be these ten people in an extended family living in all different parts of the United States and possibly elsewhere depending on how far out in the family her mailings extended. I would show all the steps each person would take gathering the materials, baking and then sharing this family recipe in the respective places they were living. This would highlight not just the individual differences but the differences in the process of making the same recipe in all the different regions the people were living in. I might also interview at least two family members that remember eating Grandma Grunthaner’s cookies. During what situations did they eat the cookies, when did she usually make them and who did she share them with and what did the people I was interviewing like most about the cookies or those events? Most likely I would not interview the people actually making the cookies but rather I would let the process of baking the cookies speak for itself. I would focus on using minimal music and narration. I would think that I would focus on the different tools used in the baking process when filming the baking shots. I would also try and get some outdoor shots of the places the people making the cookies were living to enhance the context. Since the cookie recipe was taken from the 1943 version of The Joy of Cooking I might include some historical background and information about that book and the role it played in shaping the tradition and history of cooking in America.