I love eating it, I love preparing it, man, I even just love looking at it.
Hence my slight addiction to cookbooks...for me they are perfectly reasonable bedtime reading material. If I have a new recipe book it pretty much goes where I go for the first couple of the weeks, I love to read them cover to cover, mentally devouring each and every recipe.
My problem is that, although I spend a lot of time looking through cookbooks, reading my Good Food magazines, hauling new recipes home from the library and scanning through Pinterest daily...I am somehow always at a loss as to what on earth we are going to eat each week!
It is time to take action! The only problem is that organisation doesn't come naturally to me, as a teen I would refer to my bedroom as 'organised chaos'...yes, I know you might not be able to see the carpet...yes, you might not have a clue where my homework is amongst that huge pile of papers...yes, you might have even forgotten where my bed is for all the huge piles of 'stuff' lying around...but ask me to locate something, anything (I dare you) and I will locate it in less than 10 seconds.
Which was fine. Until I moved into my own house...and lived with someone for whom it was useful for them to also be able to locate things. Since getting married I've tried on and off to find ways to be more organised, with varying levels of success.
One thing I certainly don't mind tackling is organising my magazines and cookbooks :)
I've built up a collection of Good Food magazines and up until now they just sat in a pile. Last week I bought two magazine holders and ordered them chronologically (not exactly ground breaking but hey it took me two years to do this!)
The problem I have is that I try an amazing recipe but then a couple of months later I can't remember what edition it was in! Laura shared a great recipe notebook idea but I really hate cutting magazines up...which is probably something I should get over...but for now I printed out a recipe index to list all my favourite recipes, the edition and page number (although I'm still yet to fill it in!). I can just slot this into one of the folders and refer to it as needed.
I also wanted a way to record favourite recipes in my cookbooks so I printed out small A5 indexes to go in each cookbook, recording favourite recipes and their page number...
Hopefully this way, whenever I have a mental block about what to cook, I can just scan my indexes and wait for inspiration to fill me!
The best bit it took me less than five minutes to make up the tables in Word and print them out (assuming you're not counting the two years it took for me to finally get round to doing this!).
Aaaah it's time for me to go off to make dinner!
Happy Monday :)
i know what you mean.
ReplyDeleteI started meal planning a year or so ago.. and it was the best thing ever. I could buy groceries accordingly with minimum wastage.
I stopped doing it this year.. i mean last year.. not sure why.. should start doing it again.
I am no so gentle with magazines. I got over it when the magazines started being 90% ads and 10% content. I just take out recipes that I think I would (ever) cook, punch holes and put them into a binder. I have to be realistic and admit to myself that I am not willing to cook anything fancy, or anything that requires a really hard to find ingredient (that I will probably never go treasure hunting for) or anything with pineapple (because I simply don't like it). When I'm on the fence about a recipe, I just err on the side of keeping it.
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