i have spoke before many times about my cooking notebooks and binders, and how i am working on paring down my cookbook collection, and about how i have likely hundreds of recipes saved on my phone, in my computer bookmarks, on pinterest and tick tok. so why do i fight each and every week to find meals to cook?
part of it i think is screen fatigue, i look at a computer screen all day for work, and while i have been known to enjoy some mindless scrolling on tick tok - how else am i finding all these cooking videos? - most nights the last thing i want to do is sit and scroll through hundreds of videos to find the one i want to make that night.
so i decided to make a new notebook. an end game notebook, if you will.
i visited the notebook aisle of my local dollar store and picked up yet another notebook, and one lunch break at work i sat and copied 4 recipes from tick tok into the notebook and lo and behold, i had dinner planned for the next 4 days.
progress has been slow because i have to be in the mood to watch a video and transcribe it to the notebook, and also be sitting somewhere that i can write legibly, so this book is useful, and that is not lying down on the couch watching Cardinal and trying to stay awake.
recently i decided that since i'm trying to streamline, i should copy in the recipes that i either love or still want to try from the green binder too. the green binder is messy, probably 90% of the pages are either ripped from magazines, or pages cut from magazines or printed out and taped to full size pages in the book. my new notebook system, i had already decided, would be much tidier, all neatly handwritten in a book.
that lasted 11 seconds until i actually opened the green binder and the first 3 pages that fell out were family recipes of my and the misters family that I would rather have the original of, and not copied. so i taped them in.
after i taped them in i was like no more! but i already know that won't necessarily be true - i have a few of my moms recipes that she wrote out and i always loved her handwriting, so i will want to keep those too.
i'm using a critical eye as well with the transition, not adding everything, but looking and seeing if it's worth keeping - if we already made it, would we want to eat it again? if we haven't - realistically will we make it? i've already recycled quite a few pages, and didn't even feel bad about how long i have held on to some of them. sometimes it's good to let go.
