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.
2 comments:
So true Dino I have been doing that for years except with my super favs and those are on index cards which are now in a small photo type album that the cards fit into perfectly... eventually i will get around to typing those up and putting them in a bigger 3 ring binders.... many I have already like that since learning in pastry school to carry everything with you in a binder with plastic sleeves as not to get chocolate on you favorite torte recipe and only on your fingers which you can lick when no one is looking at home......
oh one more thing for those who find recipes in mags they want to keep you can xerox and add that to a clear sleeve without ripping out the recipe and making the mag unusable for someone else........ .......which happens most i have noticed in places where you are in a waiting room and bumming that the recipe you would have like to tried in Good Housekeeping has been ripped out by someone else who last sat in your very seat of course not I ... chef laura
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