Friday, February 18, 2011

Write in your cookbooks!


Do it. Do it now. Do it often. Dirty up those cookbooks. Scribble in them. Doodle in them. Document in them.

If you are a food lover, someone that loves cooking, or even someone who just opens a cookbook occasionally, WRITE IN YOUR COOKBOOKS.

Maybe this seems like an obvious notion to you, but it was anything but obvious to me. It wasn't until my sister-in-law told me about how much she loved reading an old annotated cookbook that I even considered scarring up my cookbooks with my chicken scratch. It's as though it were some blasphemous act to write a note in a cookbook that is your very own. The thought of writing in pen, let alone pencil, in any sort of book other than a notebook seemed like a cardinal sin. But why?

For no good reason - that's for sure!

So now I write in my cookbooks. I write in all of them. I write in them every time I make something new, and even sometimes when I make something for a second, third, or fourth time.

I always write the date - that's a good start. It's fun to look back at when you made it for the first time. I write about who I served it to and whether or not they liked it (and if I liked it). I write about any substitutions, additions, or omissions. Best of all, I write about what was going on when I made it.

They say that we have strong associations between smells and memories. Well, now I also have strong associations between foods and memories.

We had a chicken dish the night we got Mowgli. I made lemon poppyseed pound cake, oatmeal energy bars, and borscht the day before JC was born.

What do I do when it's an electronic recipe? I blog about it I guess!

1 comment:

  1. This is interesting, because the other night I made a pork tenderloin with roasted grapes, which I think would have tasted good to most people, but which I wasn't really a fan of because of the licorice-y taste of the fennel seeds I used in the rub. I wanted to write something on the recipe page saying something like "Might be good without the fennel," but I stopped myself because I didn't want to mark up my pretty recipe book - I had just received it as a Christmas present, and the pages were so perfect and clean! But you've inspired me to change my mind. Maybe I'll start out slowly by writing in pencil first, though...

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