My Salad Days

A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
-Pat Conroy

Cooking is a philosophy; it's not a recipe.
-Marco Pierre White

To me, my recipes are priceless.
-Colonel Sanders

Many years ago, I used to enjoy cooking. Many many years ago.

It’s actually quite amazing that I can remember that far back, but I did like buying different ingredients, and trying out new recipes.

When I was newly married and had my own kitchen with its own pots and pans, spoons and sieves, I began to collect recipe books. I had received a few as wedding presents but, while these had lovely pictures, the recipes were either boring, impractical, too expensive, or – and this happened surprisingly often – nonsensical. (Everyone knows that nectarines and strawberries grow in different seasons! At least in my local shuk…) I needed to buy my own books to reflect my new life in Israel.

Recipe books are, in fact, a great way to learn Hebrew, and I bought several. I learned the words for bean sprouts and turnip, nutmeg and ginger, grater and peeler, stir and sauté. I even learned the word for recipe.

We put up shelves in the kitchen to store all the cookbooks I bought and I perused them often looking for inspiration.

When the kids were little and I was home with them, I would often try out new things: bean and barley soup, cinnamon-laced meatloaf, bizli covered chicken, lemon meringue pie, mandelbroit, squash with red peppers and zaatar, banana chocolate chip cookies. (Some offerings were more popular than others.)

And then, one day, I got a job. I was meaningfully employed. I had a desk with pens and pencils and a stapler, and a computer with a keyboard and a mouse, a fax machine, and a printer.

My job was not arduous, and I often had spare time on my hands where I was simply required to be in the office ‘just in case’. I spent some time looking up recipes online to see how I could prepare the extra eggplant I had just bought, or what to do with one of the ten bags of pasta I needed to use up before Pesach. I would find a wonderful recipe that was just perfect. My memory not being great, I would print up the recipe on the printer that was just next to me so I would have it when I got home. And then I would print up the other recipe because I couldn’t really decide which one to use. And what to make for dessert? And the salad recipe looked interesting also. I would print up a few recipes and take them home and put them on the kitchen shelf with the recipe books.

I worked with a printer next to my desk for 17 years.

I didn’t print out recipes every day, but by the time I retired, there were more than a few pieces of paper piled around the house. If I ever actually needed a recipe that I knew I had, I was not able to find it and would have to look it up online again (and print it out).

I decided a while ago that one of my first projects upon my retirement would be to organize said piles of recipes into categories and file them away properly where I would be able to find them when needed. 

First I had to make room for the piles. I cleared away space in the only area big enough to hold the piles – the floor – brought pile after pile from the kitchen shelf, and plopped myself down to begin.

It was cold on the floor. I was going to have to put on some socks, but there were two problems:

1. I hate socks.

2. I would have to get up off the floor to put them on.

It took me two and a half days, but I succeeded in separating all the recipes into categories: soups, salads, meats, side dishes, dairy foods, potatoes and rice, and baked goods. Being a good Jewish girl, I also made a pile of kugel and latke recipes (I had, at least, 23 different kugel recipes and 47 latke recipes), and another for hamantashen (none of which I have ever made and probably never will). There was also a small pile of special foods for Rosh HaShana, and a HUGE pile of Pesach recipes.

While dividing all the recipes into categories, I was able to discard about a third of them as either doubles or recipes that asked the question ‘what were you thinking????’

I was now left with half a dozen piles that needed sub-categorization.

I began with the soups. I divided them by ingredient; tomato soup in one pile, onion soup in another etc. etc. Seeing as I had 12 different minestrone soup recipes, I had to read them all to see if they were different from each other. Spoiler – they weren’t. I kept two recipes. (One has green beans and one has peas).

I had some trouble with the sub-categorization. Should the artichokes and carrots in lemon sauce be with the carrots or with the artichokes? Or, and this just occurred to me, with lemons??? And what about the potato pizza? Should it be in the potato pile or in the pizza pile – two utterly different categories?

This was not a simple task.

It’s been just over a week since I began this project, and I’m almost finished. I have filled six binders with organized recipes and I have several loose plastic covers holding more recipes because I ran out of binders. I even cleared space on a shelf.

My floor is almost cleaned up. I have one more pile remaining – the baked goods pile (which is really quite high, but to be fair it includes cookies, cakes, pies, brownies, donuts, and banana bread). I’ve managed to reduce the original piles by about half.

Some members of my family have asked me, since everything is so nicely organized, will I be cooking every day? Will I be trying out new recipes again? Now that I’m retired and have more time on my hands, will I rediscover my joy of cooking?

It turns out that collecting recipes and cooking are two totally unrelated hobbies.

But if anyone ever needs a recipe for couscous salad, I’ve got five.