As some of you may know, I am currently working on an autobiographical novel.  Rubes asked me today to share some of my traditional childhood recipes, so rather than type the recipe, I thought I'd share the excerpt from the book that talks about my grandmother's cheese blintzes.

I welcome everyone's feedback...

 After we moved in to the apartment above Grandma and Grandpa, my mother painted the smallest of three bedrooms pink, hung a border with dancing ballerinas along the top of the walls, and deemed this room mine.  I woke up in the middle of the night fearfully watching the shadows from the straggling light seeping in from the window.  The ballerinas began to move.  They started their slow, sinister dance all around the room.  Terrified, I would bolt up in bed and start to cry.  My father worked nights and my mother would complain that she did not get enough sleep.  So, when I woke up crying because the ballerinas were dancing and they were not supposed to, she would get pissed off and yell at me to "stop screaming!"

Most people felt badly for my mother.  Her husband was never around, she was the breadwinner of the house and her child would not sleep.  I woke up every single night, often two and three times per night, screaming from nightmares.

In the meantime, my Grandparents adored me.  They beamed at the sight of me.  When I would scream in the middle of the night, my grandfather would wake up my grandmother.

"Get the kid," he demanded.

Diligently, my grandmother would charge up the stairs, grab me and bring me back to their house, where I felt safe, and slept soundly.

Grandma would collect me almost every night.  I would wake up in her house to warm yellow sunlight and the smell of butter sizzling in a frying pan.  In Grandma's kitchen, I had a choice of eggs, French toast, or cereal.  She made chocolate milk for me with Hershey's syrup.  I took such delight in watching the milk change from white to brown as Grandma stirred it with a spoon.  Grandpa would sing and play games with me.  I felt loved.

When I was very small, Loli (my grandfather) continued to work.  Even though they sold the jewelry store before I was born, Grandpa still had customers and conducted business out of the house, with frequent trips to New York's diamond district interspersed.  I have vivid memories of him coming home from LACE w:st="on">ManhattanLACE> in a tweed trench coat and matching fedora hat featuring a green and yellow parrot feather that stuck-up from the band.  I would run to him and he would scoop me up into his arms.

My Grandma loved to cook.  Every week, she watched Julia Child and tried re-create what she saw.  Grandma made the best cookies: Linzertortes filled with raspberry jam, Italian-style cream puffs, sugar cookies, chocolate dipped cookies, and Madelines.

Grandma's cheese blintzes were always a special treat.  She would begin making crepes in the middle of the week, while Loli would "make his stops" in LACE w:st="on">ManhattanLACE>.  Patiently, she would pour the pancake-like batter onto a frying pan, smooth it out with a spatula and then carefully flip it over.  She never knew how to flip the crepes in the air, but occasionally, she would get rambunctious and try.  After she accumulated a stack of crepes, Grandma would let them cool off on the counter, then come back later to wrap them in plastic wrap and put them in the fridge.

The next day, Grandma would make the cheese filing.  She would mix sugar into a pint of farmer's cheese with a wooden spoon.  Then, she would sit down at the little, round, oilcloth-lined kitchen table and begin to stuff the blintzes.  Carefully folding the pastry so that nothing would break, she made enough blintzes to fill a large plastic serving tray. 

We usually ate blintzes on the weekends.  Breakfast took about two hours and everyone would come downstairs to eat.  Grandma would fry the blintzes on the stovetop and serve them hot, topping them with canned cherry or blueberry pie filling that she heated up in a saucepan.  I loved it!