Keep a Recipe Record Book

This is my idea for keeping track of good recipes; ones I find and modify, family recipes, and ones I make up myself. I buy those little hard-bound record books, Simplex Records, to write my recipes in. Each page is about perfect for one recipe, though some recipes take two pages. Some journals can work well also.

I started my first one in 1980, and I'm working on filling my third. They reflect the changes in my cooking style over the years. Each one is a different color so that I can tell at a glance which one to grab. Every time I make something up on the fly and it turns out really good, I put it in my current book. My first book has some of my mother's recipes in it (I wish I had a lot more of her recipes!). I love "finding" an old recipe I had forgotten, like my first piccallili, which was already an old recipe back in '80. Someday I will pass them on to my daughter, and I hope she'll enjoy them - and add her own.

I call my books "How to Burn Water: Recipes for Haute, and not so Haute, Cuisine", and date each one when I start them.

By Free2B from North Royalton, OH