After filing the clippings yesterday, it was time to visit the nether regions of my recipe card collection. I started jotting down recipes from magazines or other sources when I was in college and continued until it became much easier to print off a recipe from the internet. Some of these cards I hadn’t looked at since before we moved to Seattle; hence, it was high time for a little weeding.
As with the cookbook cull, the discarded recipe cards fell into several categories:
- Missing ingredients. When we lived on the East Coast,we’d cook bluefish a lot. It’s reasonably inexpensive, and stands up to tomatoes and other strong flavors. Unfortunately, bluefish doesn’t make it to West Coast supermarkets. (Consolation: The salmon we get here is much better than Back East.)
- I don’t cook/eat that way anymore. Some of the 1980’s-vintage recipes were from the era when folks were trying to eat ridiculously low amounts of fat and making some grisly tradeoffs in the process. Other recipes were heavy on ingredients that I don’t keep in my home, such as margarine or shortening.
- Dumbed-down ethnic cuisine. I can get most of the ingredients I need to make the real stuff hereabouts, so why should I suffer with sad substitutions?
- Send in the clones. How many iterations of braised chicken with tomatoes and artichoke hearts does one need?
- Illegible. Some of the ink was fading on the cards. And damn, did I actually write that small back in the day? No wonder Mom would complain about my letters.
At the end of the chore, I had a two-inch stack of cards that went into the recycling bin. Mission accomplished.
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