This is a story about my recipe box. There may be hidden meanings in this tale that I give you permission to use in future Sacrament Meeting talks.
Above you will see my own creative recipe box. I 'inherited' this plastic piece of junk when I worked in an office at BYU and they were throwing things out. I am a scavenger by nature and saw this plastic beauty and thought to myself, "What a lovely box to keep my recipes in!" I was newly married and therefore slightly delusional as evidenced by my thinking I needed a plastic recipe box.
I had a lot of spare time while I worked in this office and I also had access to a label machine. So I furthered my domesticity quotient by creating labels for my recipe box. See how organized I could be?
Fast forward ten years later. See how none of my recipes actually make it in their designated spot? They are all shoved in the first slot since it takes WAY too much time to file a recipe correctly. Much, much easier to shovel through a million scraps of paper to find the one I was looking for.
And the final proof of how I love excitement and suspense. There is no pleasure in looking for a recipe if it's on a boring index card or even labeled! Baking is so much more enjoyable if you are not 100% sure what it is you are making. Add that to the challenge of fitting a recipe on the smallest scrap of paper you can find and you have one grand adventure.
That is the story of my recipe box. You may invite me to teach a class at Enrichment night on making darling recipe boxes, but I don't think they make that kind of plastic anymore. I would also like to offer a special thanks to the Playmobil Pirate for being my scale model.
10 comments:
You should really try making a recipe blog; that keeps everything in nice order. (plug for myyummyfood.blogspot.com)
At Enrichment night they taught us how to file jobs in a file box like that. Nice idea- but dang. Who wants to be restricted to a little box? Who wants a piece of plastic to be in charge? Hence your need to rebel with all the disorganized recipes.
Ha ha so funny! But I am still stuck on the scavenger part - I went VT last night, and the lady we go to was telling us about when her mom died they would fill the huge city can up every night with her stuff, and in the morning it would be empty. She said this went on for weeks, and the city never emptied it. Just the neighbors. I could get the address if you want to move into the neighborhood. The scavenger part just cracked me up!
wow! i'm impressed! I thought all your family ate was Hamburger Helper.
my family only eats hamburger helper when I am not there to eat the grossness with them. or if i am really having a busy day. or if i let Ike choose what we eat. or if it was on sale and i need to get rid of a few boxes. but those are the only times we eat hamburger helper! all the other days it's a complete meal featuring all the food groups. organically grown food of course.
That is just like my recipe box--only imagine it file-size so it can hold even more mangled scraps of paper. I started taping my most-used recipes on the inside of the kitchen cabinet door. One day I will have them all nicely typed up on matching paper and laminated. Or I could just remember them--after weeks of making maple syrup you'd think I could remember the proportion of sugar to water but I always have to look at the recipe to make sure.
Does anyone else make syrup?
I make my maple syrup... of course, the kids prefer the stuff in the lady shaped bottle (boys!) so I only do it when we're running out of syrup anyway.
I had a recipe box that looked almost identical to that - even the little scraps of paper - then bought myself a new wooden one that looks awesome in my kitchen planning to be organized... so now instead of a useless plastic recipe box filled with scraps of paper - it's a useless wooden recipe box filled with scraps of paper, that's keeping up with the Joneses!
Living on the edge - I was thinking about that title in my conversations with Reg, and remembered back to when you trumped Leon's authority with the daily budget for bagels. He wanted to put in 20 cents a day, but you won with $10.00 a week. I am still weepy eyed thinking of that moment in Megan/Leon history. And i guess after mulling that over I don't feel so bad about our marital spat on your blog...Good Times I say...Good times!
I still like scavenging stuff. I'm like "t" now and make my syrup only if I run out of store bought -- but (whine whine) now that I have to make pancakes and waffles from scratch so as not to poison Dan we don't need much syrup. My recipe box is pink, dirty, and could really use a makeover. I've got a nice notebook started for our favorite recipes -- but it needs a bit of work still. The pirate was a nice addition to the pics.
Those recipes with the itsy bitsy writing take me back to the days of reading your letters with a magnifying glass...written on whatever registration pieces of scraps you could scrounge. Old habits die hard!
I was inspired and began to clean out my recipe shelf this weekend... the books are stacked all nicely... and then it was taking too much time. The cards that did fit are all shoved into the beverages slot of the recipe box and the miscellaneous junk that didn't fit is shoved into a zip-loc bag to be gone through later (meaning here, thrown away when I finally give up my ridiculous organization dreams!)
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