The green plastic binder bulged at the seams. It swelled and throbbed as if it had a pulse. A heartbeat. A hunger for more. “Feed me more recipes!” it demanded.
The dreaded recipe binder.
The once-tame beast had broken its bounds. Grown gargantuan and overflowed with sheets filled with ingredients and steps for meals that we would NEVER undertake. But it didn’t stop us from printing more off and stuffing them in the binder.
“Oh, this looks simply delicious. Squid ink pancakes. I’m sure we’ll make that someday.”
Chomp, chomp, chomp. “Give me more.”
Only now, when you pulled the binder out to find something, its guts spilled all over the floor in a 17-ton tsunami of loose copy paper and magazine clippings.
“AHHH, I hate you, recipe binder,” I would cry.
There was no way to find anything you needed. It always took longer to sift through the mess than to cook an actual meal. The once-neat organizational system broken into sections of recipes that were stored safely in plastic sleeves had long since been abandoned, devolving into a “jam it in before it explodes!” approach.
“What are chicken cutlets doing with cupcakes?!?” my wife said horrified and disgusted as she rifled through it recently. “This is an affront to society!”
That turned out to be the final straw. “We have to do something about this,” she said.
So, this past weekend we sat down to tackle the monster recipe binder. Job No. 1: Weed out all the recipes that would never be used.
It sounded so easy, but became a long, frustrating, laborious task. Equal parts exhaustion and exasperation, with a pinch of emotion thrown in for nostalgia’s sake.
We found all manner of things in there. A recipe for making a fake bloody ice hand that could be dumped in a Halloween punch bowl. Thanksgiving menus and planners with supportive messages on top that read: “Don’t panic. This is sure to be a disaster no matter what you do.” The realization that we have an unhealthy relationship with our dog, as well as maybe an unhealthy dog. There were numerous recipes for dog cookies and dog treats and even some dog cakes.
It was like looking through a list of busted New Year’s Eve resolutions. A trip down memory lane of plans and goals and big ideas. How I would become a master Italian chef with incredible sauces and homemade pastas. Fail! Plans to eat healthier by following some diet fad or using quinoa for everything from breakfast cereals to smoothies. That went well.
Through it all, we could also see the entire progression of our adult life like rings on a cut tree. There toward the back were the early staples – those recipes that represented post-college, early-professional when chicken nuggets shifted from frozen to homemade, and I would whip up a barbecue sauce that tasted exactly like the cheap store-bought kind. Man, that was living!
There were also memories tucked in. Recipes for salad dressings from old friends we haven’t talked to in years or cocktail recipes from parties we used to hold after we were married.
There were the early years of my daughter’s life when we would all gather in the kitchen to try something fun, but anything but nutritious. Or when we tried to bake vegetables into breads or cookies in a failed attempt to add vitamins and minerals to a life that had devolved back to frozen chicken nuggets. How the wheel of life doth spin round …
There were holiday-themed recipes for Halloween parties or a Christmas tenderloin, all the way to the present, when my daughter is pushing us toward a more vegetarian, sustainable and animal-friendly path. FAKE frozen chicken nuggets!
I never thought a recipe binder could be anything more than just a holder of paper and ink to use for cooking. A storehouse for unused instructions and forgotten meals. But suddenly it was much more than that. Less a monster and more a scrapbook, or even a household diary.
Maybe because of that, we didn’t get too far. We were able to clear out about 5 tons of unwanted, or unemotional, recipes. But that still left the recipe monster with plenty to munch on. Maybe we’ll get back to it another day.
Or maybe it will stay intact as a sort of culinary time capsule. Good for a stroll down memory lane. A snapshot of how our lives have changed, and all the fun we’ve had in the kitchen over the years. Plus, you never know when you might need that chicken nugget recipe again.