The Canon

I’m finally finished organizing my recipes. Well, as finished as I’m ever going to be. I like experimenting with new dishes too much to ever just cut myself off completely and say, “Nope. I’ve got the 30 recipes we like to eat. That’s enough for me.”

Since it’s been a while, let me catch us up in a nutshell.

Bear’s Aunt Liz wrote a cookbook, and the real genius of it is in the meal planning. She has a theme night for every night of the week to narrow down the options and make it easier to decide what to cook from every single recipe in your repertoire.

I decided on the theme nights I wanted for us, and then I made notebooks to help me organize everything. Then I set about on a mission to fine tune all my recipes and get them just the way I wanted them, then I would add them to their proper categories and the recipe would enter “The Canon.”

I created a whole bunch of word documents, and every time I got a recipe just right I’d type it up and copy paste into whatever categories applied. Once I got all the recipes I make on a regular basis all typed up, then I printed them all out, put them in page protectors so that I can clean up any spills, and sorted them into their little categories.

I even did this with my side dishes and it saves me so much time. Now I can turn to one section for veggie sides, and another for starchy sides.

Some meals are so simple that a full-on recipe is overkill, so I have an “Ideas” page at the beginning of each book for things like Fried Chicken (that I could make in my sleep) or Grilled Cheese Sandwiches (that anyone could make, but often doesn’t get considered as meal-worthy).

The Pizza Night notebook has the occasional recipe in there – crust, sauces, etc. – but it’s almost more a selection of shopping lists, or reminders that when I get sick of BBQ chicken pizza, I can throw bacon on the top and all of a sudden it’s a whole new thing.

I also keep a notebook full of magazine clippings and internet printouts – recipes I want to try. The mistake I made last time was including in my cookbook every recipe that looked interesting and that led to a lot of wasted flipping through and some very unpleasant discoveries when those recipes didn’t work out.