Keep your recipes clean.

We had a fair bit of people coming in today, which was nice. I don't know what it is about the rain, but it seems like going out to get a bowl of soup is way easier than going to the effort of making it at home. It's cool. It's why we have those places that we count on. I've got soup at home too, mind you, but the house-soup involves washing dishes. And when it's gloomy and dreary and ugly outside, I'm frankly not in the mood.

Aside from that, however, I did manage to get a fair bit of work done.

Outside.

Had to run down to the store to pick up a few essentials, and get back in time to do some re-typing for Boss Man.

I don't know if y'all do this at home, but it's a good idea, and I wish I'd seen it sooner. Cliff keeps the recipes for Chow in a big binder. What makes this different from the binders that most people have? Each recipe sits in a plastic sleeve. Genius.

It didn't strike me as important, until I was re-typing some of the recipes (you know how it goes; over time, you pencil in corrections, and the whole thing looks a mess before long), and was discarding the plastic liner. It was clean, mind you, because the restaurant is clean. But there were tell-tale spots. Some of the plastic pages had little marks on them from heavy objects being set atop them. Some had stains of spices (turmeric never leaves, no matter how hard you try). And today, I brilliantly splashed water on the page, while doing the transfer.

What'd I notice? The recipe was intact.

How many times have you had a recipe become unreadable because a splash of soy sauce, or an errant mustard seed flying out from hot fat ruins the page? And you and I both have recipes that are irreplaceable. Yes, I know that you mean to type them into your computer. But you and I are both good at one thing: putting it off till later.

Well, later is here now. There's a couple of take home messages here.

1) Don't take your cookery books into the kitchen. It's not a safe place for books to be. By looking at the mishaps that the poor little recipe page went through in my own hands alone, it should be crystal clear that if you want to be able to use those recipes, you need to be able to read what they say, and having an old or expensive or autographed book in the kitchen isn't a good idea.

2) Cover your typed or hand written recipes in plastic before you take it into the kitchen.

3) Feel free to replace the plastic when it wears down. It's bound to happen. Yes, I know that the paper costs less than the plastic cover, but be mindful that the cost of a very useful recipe that you refer to repeatedly is priceless!

Also, be smart. Save the document when you've finished printing it out. For some stupid reason I never thought to do this till now. Good job, Dino. That would have been hours of typing that I've flushed down the aether because I couldn't be fussed to hit the save button.