Chaos

From recipe chaos to recipe harmony? Kinda

Cabin Fever struck me in an odd way last month. Having been housebound for days because of snow, flash floods, and plain laziness, an urge to organize overcame me. No desire to brave the 14-degree weather so I could escape the house, just a need to do something useful.

Not that I couldn’t have been doing that all along, but Arctic weather, pouting skies, and howling winds drove me to relaxing with a cup of hot chocolate and reading for hours without an ounce of guilt. Then the sun came out, making me restless as my mother’s guilt-conjuring voice urged me from my sanctuary. “You’ve lingered too long. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop” suddenly sprang into my consciousness.

Well, I could look for that Ala Vodka recipe that John and I loved. We had made it way back in the fall. Where did we file it?  For years we have saved our favorite recipes, clipped them from newspapers, printed our online favorites, collected handwritten ones from our Circle Supper Super Chefs, and filed them in notebooks.

The notebooks started out well organized because my husband, John the Engineer, loves categories and dividers. He meticulously hole punched the recipes to fit our notebook, filed  them in their appropriate section, all in alphabetical order and easy to locate.

Then I started adding to the notebooks. I crammed recipes into side pockets, because I was too busy to properly file them away. I’d print them from websites and toss them Helter Skelter into the loose leaf. They just hung out there, candidates for hide and seek expeditions when I needed that special Peppercorn Cream Steak Sauce. Oh, there it is, slipped in between The Pioneer Woman’s Caramel Sauce and my friend Bonnie’s Triple Berry Sangria. Well, at least it was in with the S’s.

Granted, I am retired and have time to properly file each recipe. But I needed to read my books, solve the LA Times crossword puzzles, and teach myself Sudoku. Organizing recipes, really? How uninspiring, until . . .

That shivery day that Cabin Fever hit. My Presbyterian upbringing had emphasized that too much slacking off could send you straight down the primrose path, so I gathered all our recipe books, the loose recipes, printed out recipes from my computer file, and got to work. That Ala Vodka recipe was still MIA—maybe I’d find it, but in the meantime, I’d have organized recipes never to lose another one.

I wouldn’t say that our recipes are now perfectly organized or ready for display on Pinterest, but they are corralled in one notebook–mostly. One notebook that John has kept for over 30 years, still houses appetizers, soups, and desserts. We will keep that as a specialty book.

My French friend Marguerite gave us an exquisitely bound cloth Livre de recettes that encourages only handwritten recipes. No words but an intricately sketched tabs indicate food categories. Who would want to desecrate such a beautiful book with pasted, magazine recipes? (Look for that gorgeous coral cover in the top photo.)  It’s a recipe shortcut to those utilitarian recipes we use time and again. The big notebook acts more like the Safari browser, a way to find old or new recipes when we don’t know what we want for dinner.

While I am proud of my well-organized loose leaf of our recipes, the handwritten recipes are special. Somehow those strokes and curls and dots over i’s intermingled with a greasy smudge here and there, make those recipes all ours. It no longer belongs to All Recipes or Food Network but to our families to one day peruse and say, “Oh, I remember her making this hummingbird cake for my birthday.”

For now our recipes are no longer condemned to total chaos–maybe to limbo—but my  mother no longer sits on my shoulder “tsk, tsking” but with a smile on her face.