February 1, 2011 - Today's Project: Recipes

Well our internet is currently down due to the storm (according to the news it’s the “STORM OF THE CENTURY!!”), but we still have power so I can at least use Microsoft Word to type this for now.  I’ll just have to post it later.

I don’t usually cook directly from recipes, but I do like to keep some around to consult every now and then, especially when I am in a dessert-making mood.  Unfortunately, I tend either to write down recipes on scraps of paper that are readily available when I am cooking, or I print a recipe off of the internet and scribble my notes all over it.  So in one of the kitchen cabinets there was a pile of random papers with recipes (okay, mostly illegible scribbles) on them.  Most of the recipes weren’t even labeled with what they were.  Here are some examples of my record-keeping skills:

In the spirit of my newly organized kitchen, I decided to tackle the recipes as well.  So today I typed them all up, printed them out, and put them in a binder in plastic page protectors.  There aren’t any pretty pictures or anything, but it suits my purposes.  I did have some recipes that I had typed up before in efforts to make them look presentable to others (or at least legible).  Many of these I had made changes to in pencil since they were printed, or they were covered in food because I am a messy cook.  They were still on my computer though, so I made my changes and reprinted them to add to my binder.  This is what my recipes look like now:

 

Hooray!  And now when I spill food everywhere I can just wipe it off. 

I can’t wait to go outside tomorrow to take pictures of the snow!  We are supposed to have something like 2 feet by morning.  Scott’s boss said they should “try” to get to work tomorrow, but if the roads are too bad it is okay to call off.  Scott seems to think working tomorrow is a good idea, but I have been trying to convince him he should stay home to have a snow day with me.  Hot chocolate and snow forts!!  I mean, come on!

Miss Kitty Fantastico

While cleaning out the cabinets on Saturday, I came across an old bag of catnip.  Kitty has been enjoying it ever since:

All that junk on the floor is not dirt.  It is catnip.  Kitty likes to tear into the bag so the catnip gets all over the floor, and then roll around in said catnip.  So for the past couple days, I've just left the destroyed bag on the floor in the middle of the kitchen to enjoy when she gets the urge.  I'm a bad cat mom, enabling her addictions and all.  Maybe I'll clean it up tomorrow so we don't have to walk through catnip piles to get into the kitchen.

The kitchen!

My suburban life: I spent my Saturday evening reorganizing the kitchen.  The way our kitchen was organized had been driving me crazy for months.  There was way too much stuff crammed into each space.  One drawer held every cooking utensil we owned, so you had to dig through it looking for what you wanted for what felt like ten minutes.  It bothered me, but I kept putting off doing anything about it.  I was inspired by some of the pictures on Kath Eats Real Food.  She showed how she organized some of the rooms in her house, starting with her kitchen.  I finally realized what I needed.  Containers!!  So Scott and I headed over to the Container Store Saturday afternoon and grabbed a bunch of stuff, including my favorite, a new spice rack!  I have been wanting one for soo long.  I modeled my drawers of cooking utensils almost exactly after Kath's pictures.  You will notice some of my pictures look almost identical.  I moved some stuff into the pantry and now the utensils are in two drawers instead of one, which makes a huge difference.  I was so excited that I didn't think to take any before pictures, but here are some afters:

 

Yes, we do have a guitar-shaped spatula.  You don't?

I also redid the pantry.  I moved all of the spices out into my pretty new spice rack:

I added some canvas totes to contain/organize some of the contents of the pantry.

 

 

Other new things include a lazy susan and a mesh basket for hot chocolate packets.  That mesh basket on the second shelf from the top is indeed full of packets of instant hot chocolate.  And it is deep.  Not square.  We have a lot of hot chocolate.

I am so happy to have a better-organized kitchen.  I also rearranged all of the lower cabinets (there are two small ones and two big ones), but those don't have cool new containers in them, so I didn't take any pictures.

After that was all done, Scott and I went out to see No Strings Attached.  It was pretty good.  I laughed a lot, but the ending was super corny.  To be expected from a romantic comedy, I suppose.

Standard first post

Before I went to college, I was good at keeping a journal.  This seems like an easy way to get back into that habit.  Plus I can be narcissistic and imagine that lots of people are reading this and care about my life.  Even though that "lots of people" is probably just my mom.