Binders Full of Recipes

And Mitt thought HE had problems.

My recipes are everywhere.  Loose pieces of papers, dog-eared magazines, sticky photo albums with yellowing pages stuck to the plastic covers and/or embedded in the waxy pages.  It's all a mess.

I've got to do something about this, and after giving it much thought (two years of thought), I'm going to go with the simple three-ring binder and the hole-puncher idea.

I considered "cybering" my recipes but that would mean that I'd have to carry a laptop into my kitchen and risk olive oil fingerprints on my screen or flour and sugar working its way into my keyboard.  It would also mean that I wouldn't be able to write notes [edit] in the margins.

So I've got my ugly three-inch binder (can't see spending money on something "pretty" when I have a perfectly good, functional binder on the premises), my tab dividers, and my trusty three-hole puncher.

The only problem I foresee is that I may end up punching holes into the actual recipe if the margin isn't large enough.  I'll also have to deal with double-sided recipes, and what to do with photos, so this will be a cut and paste, staple, glue job if ever there was one.

That doesn't bother me.  The best recipe books are the ones that work.

And this will work for me.

Life Is Too Short

I am of the belief that life is much too short to eat the same thing twice.

Having said that, life isn't long enough to plan 65,700 unique meals, although I have no doubt that one could eat 65,700 unique meals if time were not an issue.

Fifty unique meals over the course of a year are a manageable number.  That's only one new dish a week and that shouldn't be so difficult.

I refer to this Unique Meal as the Food Fest and we do this every Sunday.  Well... we eat it every Sunday, but the work typically begins the Wednesday before.

It is the Wednesday before the Food Fest that I start poring over recipe books, magazines, newspaper clippings, a variety of websites in search of that one meal I must have before I leave this plane.

This is as much fun as the actual meal preparation and sometimes usually it's hard to decide on just one thing with all the options available.

Somehow, I manage.