patchwork recipe book

I pulled everything out of my cabinets last week so I could put some items on the new shelves and maybe finally get rid of those sippy cups lurking in the back. Right next to a stack of cookbooks from our pre-vegetarian lifestyle and a magazine called Grill It! I had no problem getting rid of my meat tenderizer, but cookbooks are a bit different. While flipping through Grill It! I located my favorite Mediterranean cabbage slaw. Hello forgotten recipe! Where have you been? Oh, right. Stuck between babyback ribs and lamb kabobs where I’m likely to never find you again! 

I decided then to start wading through the books and compiling our most used recipes in one place. A book. Keeping recipes written in a small notebook is a tip I learned from my mother. They’re easily accessible and much more portable than index cards in a box. Once when she came to visit me I mentioned needing a reliable recipe for biscuits. Mom opened her purse and pulled out years of carefully collected recipes in one little book. It was a very cool, Mary Poppins kind of moment.

For my recipe compilation I used an old book I picked up at the flea market for $1. It was pretty stained, but had a very durable binding. I cleaned the cover with some vinegar to make sure it doesn’t spread anything weird around the kitchen counters and then I got to work printing and pasting recipes to the pages. I made sure to leave the page numbers uncovered so they’ll be available for a table of contents later on.

Want to know what really got my rear in gear for this project? Needing an apple doughnut and finding the directions (which I’d bookmarked on the internet) unavailable. That awful error message about contacting the web administrator. Blah. I’d already spilled laundry detergent, tripped over a rug and been peed on by Piper P. that morning. Trying a new apple doughnut recipe would have been asking for a disaster.

I tried explaining the delay to Jonathan and he said “Why didn’t you just write it down?” It’s hard to argue with a 5-year-old’s logic. Here’s to never being unable to bake apple doughnuts again.