It's Little, But It's All Mine...

Last week, I lamented that recipes I'd printed were a pocket of chaos in my life. Saturday was a quiet day at home, and while Andrew worked on his comic collection, I decided to tackle the recipes.

I started by putting in season one of Clatterford that I'd checked out of the library. Proper mood is important.

Then I gathered plastic sheet protectors and the pile of recipes and spread out on the floor. I put all the recipes I thought I might use in a sheet protector... and then I ran out of sheet protectors.

Many of the recipes are only 1 side of a page, so I knew I could double up on a lot of the sheet protectors. That meant that I had to figure out how to organize them so I didn't have a spicy black bean salad in the same sheet protector as a fruit trifle recipe.*

I made a few piles, became overwhelmed, left the mess all over the floor and enjoyed Clatterford for awhile from the couch. This process repeated itself a few times. It's tricky to organize recipes, perhaps especially so when they're all vegetarian.** Is poached pears a side dish or a dessert? Is fake chicken salad a salad or a sandwich? I found that nearly everything was an entree in my mind. I don't cook that often, and I certainly don't make cohesive meals. If I make a new recipe, it gets the place of honor (perhaps beside something we pulled out of the freezer) regardless of what it is.

In the end, I decided that having them stuck in binders made them easily flippable, and two 1.5" binders were manageable even if the organization within them was imperfect. I have them roughly divided: salads, soups, sandwiches, desserts, entrees.

My hope is that I will flip through these to admire their tidiness and be inspired to make something that I thought looked good enough that I bothered to print it off in the first place.

If not, at least they're organized.

*Those of you who know me know that this is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.

**I asked Andrew if he wanted to go through the recipes I was planning to throw away, and I would add any he thought he might make. He declined, and as I am slowly beginning to accept that he has even less interest in cooking than I do, I threw meat recipes away unless I was particularly interested in making them vegetarian. (There were two of those, I think.) I decided if it had meat in it, I would never make it and it didn't earn a sheet protector.