Spring (recipe) Cleaning!

Happy Spring!

My attractive post-surgery footwear!

First, I must apologize for being off the radar for awhile. I had foot surgery in mid-February so my ability to do ANYTHING in the kitchen has been impacted by the requirement to always be on crutches or a knee roller. Kind of hard to bake or cook while navigating on those contraptions. Everything takes a lot longer & twice as many moves. I have a newfound respect for people with permanent disabilities. 

"Squirrel" Recipe Storage

Second, it is finally Spring, and with that comes the traditional "Spring cleaning." But given my aforementioned surgery, I am definitely not doing the typical cleaning (moving furniture, window washing, etc). No, my version involves something I can do while sitting with my injured foot elevated...going thru the hundreds (maybe thousands) of clipped recipes I've been storing in a mish-mash of folders for years. 

Now, you might be thinking "clipped" recipes? Don't you just download them and save to your Evernote file (or some other digital system)? Well, yes. Yes, I do. Now. But WAY before that was an option, people actually cut recipes out of newspapers and magazines and stashed them in some kind of file (like a squirrel storing nuts for the winter). You know, in hopes of making these recipes some day...

What was I thinking?! Was I really ever going to make "Chilled Veal Roast with Herbes de Provence and Fennel Salad?" Or "Breast of Duck with Cantaloupe?" Hmmmm, I think not, but for some reason, I saved those recipes.

Recycled Bag #1

Slogging thru my recipe piles!

After spending hours the other day going thru the file, I ended up with two huge bags of recycled recipes, and two much smaller file folders of recipes I just could not bear to part with. Even though I took photos of some of them to add to Evernotes, I decided to keep the paper version, too. Some are very old family recipes written by relatives long gone and I want to keep the recipe in their original handwriting. Some are from the late, great Gourmet magazine (circa 1998) and I'm not sure if all of their recipes have been digitally converted.

I've been meaning to tackle my recipe overload for a long time, and my surgery recovery was the perfect excuse. How do you store your recipes? Do you follow the "squirrel" method, or are you strictly a digital saver? Let us know. In the meantime, I'll be right here trying to decide if I should save this recipe from Food & Wine. It sounds so good. I'm sure I'll make it. Some day.