Wednesday, February 08, 2006

post it recipes

I have a great love of post-its, and use them for everything, including writing down recipes on the fly. Sometimes it's someone telling me what went into the amazing squash and cheese and pasta casserole at a party, and sometimes it's something on the internet that I don't want to take time to write down properly.
This is OK if I'm making whatever it is right away, so that my shorthand is fresh in my mind. But if the post-it sits around for a while the meaning of it starts to drain away, and when I unearth it weeks later it's become an un-recipe.
For instance, this nice orange post-it I just found under a stack of computer disks. It says, mysteriously:
Sesame oil
OJ
Gr onions
Ch broth? 1 cup
cornstarch
Sherry, if
Soy sauce
Peas?
No name for this dish, if it is one, and no indication of whence it came. No amounts except for the 1 cup. No instructions. This is the kind of thing that makes me think I should have a cooking notebook, wherein I place all my recipes and ideas, etc.
But I have sorry experience with my gardening notebook, which is religiously kept every spring, with lists of seeds ordered, and starts out noting what things are blooming when, and what I planted in the square of ground in the front yard that unthaws before anything else. This goes on until about May 25, when the planting gets intense and I forget all about the notebook until the next spring, when I resolve anew to keep it all summer long, and so forth.
It's tempting to assemble these ingredients and see if anything suggests itself. If it weren't for the peas, it might be a marinade?With more broth, a soup? Sherry if annoyed? If desperate? I'll never know.

4 comments:

greenwood blogger said...

I have vowed to make a garden notebook this year, mostly with drawings of what I have planted where. I will probably set it aside though, as the days get sunny and warm and my attention is drawn to the pursuits of summer outside of my yard...

holly_44109 said...

i have a notebook of all my swap info. it's really hard to stay on top of it. my recipes are really out of control! glad to see you have a food blog!

Anonymous said...

hehehe. I adore your list.

mary grimm said...

I'm always hoping to be more organized, but somehow I'm still the sort of person who has a list on a post-it and has no idea what it was supposed to mean.