The great cookbook purge
Our kitchen prepares about five hundred meals a year. Usually for a small group; two or three plus pet pest share. We aren’t crazy “Oh, we should try that” folk. No, our tastes are a function of hunger and budget, with a heaping tablespoon of “what the local market actually has in stock”.
Which leads to this evening’s mystery moment. Why do we have so many cookbooks? Not going forward, as this was Purge Day, but up until now. I swear, some of the content between the covers was never exposed to the light of day, much less the stove-to-plate model. I know why. Preparation takes time, and trying to follow a new recipe at the same time as you beat back the hunger pangs is the spoonful that overflows the soup tureen.
And so, the collection has been carefully winnowed. Not with grace, because some choices were taken as personal affronts, but in the end the boxes of “to go to a good new home” are overflowing. We’ll go back to cooking what we know (and like), carefully spiced with searches on Google. Because, let’s be fair, what was in a cookbook is now online, somewhere, carefully indexed. Why spend time reading when you can do a quick lookup and get on with life.
I also made great strides in the basement. As in, I can now stride from one end to the other. Whole cartons of junk sent to discard. I even managed to undo the keyboard drawer that hasn’t actually supported typing in decades.
