Every now and again I start a project which somehow morphs quickly into a Kitchen Table Monster. I have done so, yet again.
About a year ago, I decided to reduce clutter and paper around my house. In my kitchen, I had saved just about every copy of a magazine I get called Taste of Home, and then an offshoot magazine called Simple and Delicious. But no, that wasn’t enough! I also had select issues of Vegetarian Times, Low Carb Energy and a few others. I decided that it didn’t really make sense to keep every issue, just because there was one or two recipes in each that I liked. During this time, my eldest son came to forage in my kitchen for something to eat. He doesn’t live with me anymore, but resides about two blocks away and will now and then come home to raid the fridge. I don’t mind at all, because it means that I get to see him for awhile and catch up, but one day he was talking about cooking and it dawned on me that not only could I get recipes that appealed to me, but I could cut some for my son as well and make him a cookbook of the things *I* know he already likes to eat! I went through every magazine, cut the recipes that I wanted and donated the mutilated remnants of the pretty pictures to a local elementary school teacher who was looking for food pictures.
Time passes. Uh oh, is that a KTM I hear??
I bought the items I needed to assemble my son’s cookbook… paper to mount the recipes, a 3 ring binder, food stickers to artfully place in blank spots and plastic sleeves…and began to mount the recipes. Naturally, I found recipes that I wanted as well, or a few that were on the backs of others that I needed so I set aside a pile for copying which grew and grew and grew. After spending a whole evening doing nothing but figuring out how to cram as many recipes on top of my scanner as possible, to maximize paper usage, I finally had my two piles of recipes.
Time passes. Wow! It’s getting pretty big!
Once I had everything copied, I realized I now had to RE CUT all the recipes that I had copied. Sigh. I spent another evening clipping apart the copies and then I managed to put together my son’s cookbook during the next week. By this time, I was sick of looking at the recipes… so I put them in baggies and got busy with something else.
Time passes. Kitchen Table Monsters, when left in baggies, tend to grow extra large.
Enter boredom and a period of ennui. I looked around and realized that I had time and could finish that recipe project I had started. Woo hoo! This time I decided that my desk was too small for this job, so out to the kitchen table I went, with my binder and paper, stickers and plastic sleeves. *I* am more anal than my son, so *I* knew *I* was going to have to sort these recipes by category – sweets, appetizers, beef, chicken, poultry, dressing and sauces and so forth. And of course they would each be color coded by mounting them on different colored paper.
That was a week ago and I am officially finished with sweets and sauces and deeply into poultry right now…. of course boredom and ennui still keep popping up and I wander off to do something else, or shockingly enough, something I’m supposed to do, but I’m making some progress.
I slay thee, Kitchen Table Monster!!
And as promised.. music to slay the monster by….
Snippets and Tidbits 