Recipe Thief

Quite some time ago, I mentioned that we have recipes in multiple places. Over the last week or so, I've been working on consolidating those. There's two reasons for that: one is that I like when things are neat (I'm not a classic neat guy, but I do think that having things in a consistent place makes life simpler; at work (back when I did) a coworker came over to ask me for something, and when I opened a drawer, pulled out a folder, and read it to her, she said, startled "You're the most organized person I know!"); the other is that I've been working on expanding the menu of things that we routinely make, and this makes it possible to see what we have, and what we'd like to have. We had created a 'standard menu list' some time ago of about ten 'quick make' items (including the ever-popular Leftovers and Pizza) and about ten 'long make' items -- things we'd make only on the weekend because they took a while to prepare. Since I now have the time, and have this organizational compulsion, I've been redoing that.

The methodology is two fold. First, all of the dinner recipes that we've jotted down, copied, torn from magazines, etc all went into one folder. Well, all of the big paper recipes. I didn't touch the ones in the index card container - yet. So that meant taking the ones from the red folder (recipes we'd found and not tried), the tattered white folder (recipes we'd tried, personally or at a relatives house; in two cases, at work (hot cranberry salad, yum)), and the white binder (the binder is labelled as Frequent And Do Not Lose), and sticking them all in one folder. Then I went through all of them, segregating. If we'd only made the recipe a couple of times (or less), I put it aside to pitch (which meant: asking my wife if she had any reason to want to keep them). If we'd made the recipe fairly often but it wasn't a 'family classic', I made sure we had a digital copy, and then I put it aside to pitch (in a separate stack, and with the same conference). And if it was one of the few that we like a lot and make a lot, it went into the white folder (assuming it was printed).

I was amazed at how many recipes we had that I put aside. Also at how many dessert recipes we had. But what really surprised me was how many of the printed 'where in the world did we get this' recipes came from published sources. After typing in one or two, I started just doing a Google search for what sounded like 'unique phrases' (I think Amazon calls them 'statistically improbable phrases'); saying, for example "10 inch skillet" as distinct from "ten inch skillet". In every case, I found it on the web. About a third were from makers sites, like Campbells and Bisquick and whatnot; about a quarter were from people's blogs and such, and the remainder were from recipe sites like Epicurious, Recipezaar, and so forth. I knew these weren't our recipes -- obviously; after all, they'd been torn from magazines and such -- but I was still surprised to see how many of 'our' recipes came from someplace else. Modified, sure (someone here likes to cross out any place where a recipe says to use mushrooms), but still: from someplace else.

The organized Recipe Thief, that's me.