Saturday, July 27, 2013

My little black cookbook

I have a little black notebook.  Just one of those spiral bound basics that is about the size of half a sheet of paper and come in packs of 3 for a buck when it's a good sale.  Inside are recipes. Some handwritten, some cut out of magazines.  I trim them (and the picture if there is one) to fit on the page and glue them down with super-cheap dollar store glue sticks.  I started this for two reasons.  First was that I was swimming in individual torn-out pages from magazines, with food, or ideas that I wanted to save and try later.  (I have a separate blue notebook for the non-food stuff)  Secondly was that my box of recipe cards was next to the sink at the old house. . . apparently soaking in a puddle for months without me being aware of it. Booooooo.  Buy the time I discovered this fact all the cards inside had moldy beards on the bottom half. There was no way I was going to keep them around the kitchen, but they were all tried-and-true stuff that I didn't want to just throw away.  I could have just re-written them on new cards, but I'm not crazy about the little suckers.  I like being able to scan up and down a recipe without having to flip it back and forth or heaven forbid turn the pages!  It's also become a fun side project for sitting in front of the TV, to trim and mount a few pages at a time.  The nice thing about using the really cheap glue is that if I try something and the family doesn't like it, I just rip it off the page and glue something else there instead.  Try doing that in one of the hard-bound cookbooks you paid good money for.  I've only recently started writing notes in my cookbooks - it goes against a lifetime of training to put a pen to a page inside a hardbound cover.

The reason this is on my mind is that I just came across http://www.the-girl-who-ate-everything.com  and I've already printed out three new recipes - one of which I'll try tonight.  And while they are beautifully formatted and print out uniformly. . . I'm thinking they're way too big to put in my notebook  :(   I think with some creative trimming to them I might be able to cram them in. . . I suppose there is the multiple-page option as well.

Either way, I have to go grocery shopping tomorrow.  And while I prefer to come as close to scratch as I can manage considering I spend most of the day at work. The coming week the boys are going to be eating glorified junk food.  I've agreed to be Props Master for a production of "Deathtrap" and it's Hell Week.  So I will probably only be seeing them in the morning before school, and dinner will be prepared either by my brother or my boyfriend. . . Both of whom can manage hamburger helper or Mac and cheese, but asking them to throw a pound of frozen veg in is courting disaster.  Last week I came home to HH Beef Pasta with underdone baby lima beans mixed in *sigh* at least he tried.

Random food thought:
I've never made a "Brie en Croute". Brie cheese that has been wrapped in some variety of dough - usually with some sort of additional fruit/nut/spice filling.  The reason is - I would probably be unable to prevent myself from eating the entire gooey mess at once.  I loooooove gooey cheese.  I should make it for some event in the future where there will be a herd of people to help eat it and distract me. . . The problem is that it never pops into my head when appropriate.

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