Week 13: Major recipe organization

I almost felt a little guilty for not posting something pretty and colorful this week but my project was one that has been long overdue. For nearly 15 years I’ve been storing old cooking magazines, snips of paper with handwritten recipes and lots of printed recipes from the computer. All said and done, there were hundreds and I had absolutely no system of organization for them. You know the drill. You’re sitting in the doctor’s office waiting for your appointment when you come across a great recipe in a magazine, tear the page out and stuff it in your handbag. Or you print out a recipe from the Internet and throw it on top of a mail pile. We always think we’ll put them away but most of the time we never do. Overall, I’ve really needed to start getting some organization in my life and this was a great way to jump in and get my feet wet.

All week I spent an hour here and an hour there sorting them in to piles: chicken, fish, meat, veggies, desserts, soups, pasta dishes, etc. It was a great opportunity to trash about half of the recipes that I’d never looked at or made in all these years. At some point during the early 90's I must have had a fixation with crab cakes, pasta fagioli and African peanut soup; I had at least a dozen recipes for each one of those things. I even found an old flyer that I made when my son was a toddler and thought he lost his stuffed Barney. The biggest challenge with this project was determining how I wanted to group all the recipes. I had enough stir fry recipes to feed half of China and within that some were chicken, some were shrimp, some were beef; did they deserve their own binder?

To finish the project, I went to the dollar store and purchased a handful of binders. I sat down at the dining room table with a three hole punch and made new homes for all of the recipes. Thankfully 80% of my recipes were on full sized pages or paper but I've still got to work on getting the stray ones mounted on paper and put in with the others. Yes, I’ve still got more work to do and a few more binders to purchase but the initial groundwork has been done. I never discovered my "inner chef" until a few years ago after a divorce. I love that I finally have a nice system in place to find and look at some yummy potentials. At some point I’ll go in to each binder, make sub-categories and alphabetize them. I'd also like to work my way through each and every remaining recipe and only keep the tried and true. But for now, I’m going to sit back and bask in the glory of organized recipes.

BEFORE:


AFTER:

What did you do this week? Take a visit over to The Painted House and see what I grilled this week!

Week 10: Hand painted driftwood cityscape with candles

This week’s project was really special to me for several reasons. A few weeks ago while Breen and I were in New York City celebrating our first wedding anniversary, we were walking along the waterfront in Battery Park when Breen spotted an entire dock covered with driftwood that had washed up from all the heavy rain. We ran in to a nearby office building and grabbed a handful of umbrella bags which we then filled up with driftwood. It was one of those moments that I knew exactly what I wanted to make with my driftwood: a hand painted cityscape with carved out areas to place tea light candles. I wanted to honor both the special memory of our first wedding anniversary and the greatness of a city that lost so many on September 11th. We had to let the driftwood dry out pretty well for a few weeks before we could get this underway.

This project was also very special to me because Breen and I did this as a joint venture. He did all of the drilling and gluing and wood working; I painted the pieces of driftwood. Together we decided on how to place the pieces. Breen came up with the idea to put the Statue of Liberty on her own separate “island”. Every piece in our project is a piece of driftwood that we found that day in Battery Park. I made the crown on the Statue of Liberty with heavy card stock and Breen made a notch in the wood to secure it; I would have loved to make her crown out of tin. We worked on this together for hours last night and when we finished, we placed it on our fireplace mantel, lit the candles and smiled with satisfaction. Our driftwood creations hold wonderful memories we will never forget and there are no others exactly the same anywhere. I love getting creative with my husband. It really brings us together on all sorts of different levels. I’m so very grateful that Breen gets as excited as I do about these 52 Projects. I think this project made us both realize how nice it’s going to be to have our own space for woodworking one of these days.

Here's the back of the piece:



Here are two shots of the city at night :))



Breen working with his wood :))



What did you do this week?