Wyoming Valley native Bobby Wallace, who now lives in Montana, edited his mom’s recipes to compile a cookbook in her honor. It is called ‘Bonnie’s Family Favorites Cookbook.’
From the cookbook
This photo from the cookbook shows Bonnie Ostrowski (later Wallace) in 1957, when she was an operator for the Bell Telephone Co.
From the cookbook
After Bonnie Ostrowski Wallace of Wyoming, Pa., passed away in February 2022, her son Bobby sorted through her belongings, which included an extensive library of cookbooks.
“She was a cookbook nut,” Wallace said with a laugh. “She had hundreds and hundreds of cookbooks.”
In that collection he found a treasure — a notebook filled with family recipes written by hand in his mother’s “careful, curly cursive.” He decided to compile and publish them as “Bonnie’s Family Favorites Cookbook.”
Here were the entrees, side dishes and desserts Bonnie Wallace had whipped up for family and friends, when she wasn’t busy working as an IT professional.
Here were pieces of advice, such as “be sure to buy pieces (of chicken) with the bone in” because that’s where the chicken noodle stew would get most of its flavor. Or, in a Beef A Roni dish, “macaroni and small shells seem to work best at catching small pieces of sauce and meat.”
Here were the memories, too, such as a mention that Bonnie’s husband, Bob, whom she teasingly called “The Joy,” had Chili A La Joy ready when she came home, during the winter he was laid off. “Its spicy smell greeting me at the door, melting the stress of an icy, nerve-wracking commute home.”
Among the collection were recipes from friends, such as the Walnut Drops and Syrian Wedding Cookies.
Bonnie’s own mother, affectionately known as “Lulu,” had passed along to her such gems as the recipe for a Polish Potato Pie called Babka, as well as a Butternut Cherry Pound Cake that she’d first encountered at a bake sale at the former Marymount School in the Heights section of Wilkes-Barre.
Considering the dozens of recipes “a treasure of familial love in culinary form,” Bobby Wallace, who now lives in Montana, decided to honor his mother’s memory by publishing the collection “for our family and families around the world.”
“At first I thought it would be something for just my family,” he said during a telephone interview. “But these are really great recipes.”
While Bobby Wallace was an only child, he grew up close to his cousins, who no doubt have their own memories of Aunt Bonnie’s blueberry pies, “Never Fail Cake” and Punczes (doughnuts).
Among his local ties, he worked for the Times Leader as a sports correspondent in the 1990s, covering mostly high school and some college sports.
His mom had worked at the Bell Telephone in the late 1950s, and later for the Dana corporation in Mountain Top, followed by Owens-Illinois. “She was a fighter,” he said, explaining she bristled if anyone called her a computer programmer, because she was “a designer who hired computer programmers” during a time when not many women worked with computers.
But “the biggest job she ever did, from 2008 to 2013,” Wallace said, was to become a full-time caregiver for her husband before he died.
“I would come and visit and that would give my mother a chance to go out with her girlfriends or see a movie,” Bobby Wallace recalled. “I gotta tell you after 4 or 5 hours of being a full-time caregiver you realize just how hard it is.”
Working on the cookbook, which can be purchased through amazon.com, was a way to deal with his grief at losing his mother, Wallace said.
“It was cathartic. I don’t like to use the word ‘closure’ because you’re always gonna miss that person. But I shed a lot of tears of happiness, a lot of tears of sadness while typing the recipes in.”
