Tag: Writing

Recipe chaos

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.

Snow drought is over but is my writer’s drought?


Snowy front deck 2/2/23 (look through Japanese Maple and to your right

In the above photo, if you squint through the middle of the Japanese maple, shift your vision slightly to the right, and use a smidge of imagination, you’ll see part of our front walkway covered in snow. Yes, our snow drought here in southwest Virginia is over. We’ve had no snow in December 2022 or January 2023. Each winter Blacksburg usually receives a foot of white powder, but this year snow has been AWOL, much like my blog writing.

I ask you to imagine snow on our deck and if you can’t, here’s a photo from March 2022.

Hold that image. The front deck walkway covered in snow is important because it helped me with my writer’s drought.

When we first woke up Thursday morning and saw the snow, my husband suggested that it would be good to sweep the snow off the walkway. Except for a few years here and there like Atlanta, Georgia, and the Kwajalein Islands, he’s lived mainly in New Jersey, snow country. 

So I listen to him about snow removal as he knows more about that subject than I who had always lived in the South, except for these last ten years in Blacksburg. For me, Blacksburg is semi-south, as it gets way more snow than I ever had to snowplow or shovel in 62 southern years. I’ve learned it’s best to remove it quickly before it melts during the warm part of the day and then refreezes at night to form a lovely skating rink on your front deck.

I get the big broom because John said sweep the walkway. In my heart I know he really means shovel. We’ve known each other for 11 years, and by now I can translate the spoken word to the unspoken meaning. Instead of following my intuition and because I don’t like the snow shovel, I started with the broom.

When I had swept about halfway down the walk, my boots and broom left impacted snow, sure to be hard to remove with a broom. Immediately I halted and retrieved the hated snow shovel. I always think it is much heavier than it is. 

But Voila! This snow was fluffy, the shovel light, and I cleared the deck having fun as I pitched the sugar-like snow onto the ground where it belonged. I still had those impacted snow prints that I had to carefully remove with the shovel. I did not want to scrape up paint with the impacted snow.


Almost clean deck except for those darn boot and broom prints.

As I looked down at my fairly clean deck with only those icy boot and broom imprints, I thought about my struggle to write this blog. Sometimes I have the wrong tools (like the broom):

  1. My laptop is not charged so I can’t escape to the loft where I feel comfortable writing. 
  2. I’m out in the car and see a situation or experience a moment that inspires me, but I have no notebook or pen for jotting down the idea. 
  3. I think that Word Press is just too difficult (I long for PageMaker) to quickly post my ideas and photos—too much hassle and my ideas fade away, much like the snow did on Thursday. 

But I can avoid those problems. I can keep the laptop charged, store pens and tiny notebooks in my purse, and sign up for Word Press classes (if only I could figure out those international hours). I’ll do these tasks because I must think of myself as a blogger. I must take myself seriously. My son Michael encourages me to acknowledge I am a writer and to act like one! He sounds more like the parent and I the offspring. My writing sisters Sarah, Alice, Alisa, Anne, Jennifer, and Betty do the same. Thank you my writing friends.

The mistake with the broom that caused the icy boot and broom prints are like the mistakes I make in writing (probably several in this post). Okay, I don’t really hate the shovel just rather dislike it. Sweeping sounds easier (and is) than shoveling, but in this instance, I should have gone with my first instinct.  I needed to shovel not sweep the snow. I need to shovel words onto my blog, not sweep them away with excuses that are pretty pitiful. I need to stop worrying over not writing and write what I feel and believe. And believe me, it’s easier to shovel snow than it is to write. 

I need to click those keys, hone those Word Press skills, and let the words flow.

So I came in from the cold and headed for my laptop. That writer’s drought was about to end.