The Blair Recipe Project

Having lost my pancake recipe 5 times in a row because it was just tucked into my recipe book any which way, I decided it was time to tackle the Dreaded Recipe Book Organization Project... You all know what I mean. Recipes jotted onto scraps of paper, on index cards neatly typed but ancient with flour dust and spilled liquid spots, torn out of magazines, downloaded from cooksdotcom on full-size sheets that have to be folded up and therefore never get used.

We have every intention of getting them into some kind of binder, neatly typed and readily accessible by category if not downright alphabetized.

Once upon a time, I had taken one of those pretty blank diary type notebooks that everyone has but nobody uses, and had painstakingly copied out about 20 of my 2,000 recipes in pretty markers, color-coordinating the types of recipe...cakes, cookies, breads, cookies, meat dishes, cookies.

And then my hand wore out. So that project never got finished. Over time those pages became indecipherable because the ink bled all over the place and was eventually blotted out entirely.

Since Idle Hands are the Devil's Workshop, I decided I had nothing better to do than get that recipe book into shape once and for all. That meant NO cheating such as gluing the old recipe onto a new page.

Of course I decided to document this awesome task because nobody would believe me if I didn't.
Except the pictures kept turning out blurry. And dark. And gloomy. Are there darker forces at work? Trying to keep me from being the only person on the green Earth --except for possibly Martha Stewart-- who has her ducks all in a row and her recipes neat, tidy and organized?

I want to tell those petty Gods of Clutter and Mayhem that they need not fear me. I've already glued several long drawn out recipes right onto the pages, and I've even gone ahead and simply hole-punched the existing old recipes and stuck them in the binder.

In fact that may be what I'll do! Just hole punch everything, as is, ink blots, globs of dried cookie dough and all!

P.S: A friend suggested that I get those nice plastic page protectors that fit the ring binder and you slide the recipe down into a pocket. Neat idea! Except those only come in full-ring size binders! But next time! For sure!