An American Recipe Easel - ARE - was invented in 1988. Its a simple crafted kitchen gadget, to display your recipe card while cooking. For all those amazing cooks out there that use recipe cards to keep their favorite recipes organized and filed in those cute recipe boxes. Keeping them clean while cooking is super easy now!

The problem was starring my mother, age 67 at the time, in her face. I could see she was struggling in the kitchen while she was cooking and following her recipe on one of those 8x5 index cards she had written her recipe on.

She had a really hard time seeing it. For a couple of reasons.
1 The overhead light made a shadow of herself onto her card when she picked it up to read it.
2 To keep it clean she would place in a drawer or on the crockpot or on the toaster and pick it back up to follow it and place it back again, off the counter top and away from the stove.
3 keeping the cards clean was difficult while cooking. Finger prints, splashes, sauces, water etc always seemed to get her recipe cards dirty. And she would eventually have to copy the recipe time and again on a new clean card.

So I watched her move this card as much as seven or eight times. Up n down. Back n forth. I thought there had to be something that can help her in these moments of struggles and inconveniences.

After 7 -months of drawings and prototypes I finally got it perfected to use everyday. The American Recipe Easel was Born ! Hurray for Mom!