There was a point a couple of years ago, where I got tired of looking up a recipe in one of my vast collections of cookery books and magazines for something we enjoyed and therefore prepared frequently. I made one large book of the most regularly-used and favorite dishes; printed out pages and xerox copies of various pages in plastic protector sheets, all tidied up in a three ring binder. Some of the recipes were culled from various cooking websites and printed directly from their pages, some were ones that I copied, pasted, adjusted the print size, deleting unnecessary text, and saved them to a file on my own computer.

It all made a pretty thick binder, all told – and at some point, the pages wicked up a large quantity of water from off of the countertop. Because most of the pages were inside plastic protector sheets, they stayed damp and began to get moldy, disgustingly smelly, as well as blurring the lettering on many pages. Anyway, this week I started revamping the binder. Because as it is, the single binder had become so large and unwieldy, I plan breaking it into a pair of slightly more wieldy binders. The chicken, beef and soup recipes are all packed into in one, and the fish, vegetarian, salad and miscellaneous side dishes in the second. The desserts, preserves and sauces are already in a third binder of their own.

This necessitates calling up and reprinting those pages, finding the websites or the issues of various magazines and scanning them afresh: a bit of a chore, but it also gives me an opportunity to consider deleting some recipes entirely; something that we made once, and really didn’t like enough to fix again.  And that’s my housekeeping chore for the week … anything to put off working up the income tax return for 2024…