RECIPE HORSE

Some women are Clothes Horses, they obsess over having clothes and the variety of clothes. I have become a Recipe Horse. I kind of hate cooking, I kind of hate looking through endless recipes in cookbooks, but I started a new fetish out of mere necessity of being gluten free.

This weekend is going through two things in my house (since it is bad weather), one, my closest, since I haven't had time to keep up on the maintenance of my clothes and the weather has turned cold, I need to go through it and check to see what I have to wear for the winter, plus discard all of my old clothes to good will. Two, my recipe folders. I truly need to go through it and throw away recipes that I have collected, either the ones I have tried and they were bad, or I haven't tried and they just need to go away.

I have also become frugal, not to the point that I couldn't throw away old food, but I feel so bad that I wasn't paying enough attention in my kitchen to either eat the food I made or at least save it in the freezer. I had a huge freezer once and it turned into the freezer burn Mecca of my cooking kitchen. I learned having a huge freezer is subconsciously waisting food that you don't pay attention to. It is like having a file box that you use but never do the filing. Everything gets lost and then obsolete or misplaced. No one should have either one.

We have two fridges. If I ever build again, I will definitely have two fridges and two ovens, plus a warming tray in my kitchen. Two dishwashers sound really good too, but sort of impracticable for two people. An installed deep fryer sound pretty good too. Back to the fridges. We have two fridges that have a third of the appliance as a freezer. I try to cook and shop to keep a good supply of meats and baked goods in case I need them. You never know when someone is going to drop by and you need to entertain. But they are small enough that I tried to go through the entire freezer before I start stocking it again. It's amazing the cookie dough that gets placed in the back, or the appetizers someone brought to your last party that never got ate.

Okay, okay, back to the recipe thing... A friend of mine told me once she was having the same problem so she will think of an ingredient that's in her fridge, google only the ingredient in some of these recipe sites and it will pull everything you can make with that one ingredient. Since my necessity and frugality have hit a crossroads, this has become a new thing everyday at work. I think I have a quart of cream I bought out of thinking that sounds really cool to have in your fridge, and then truly what do you do with heavy whipping cream. It's amazing how many things cream goes in once you start googling it. This weekend is corn tortillas. I absolutely hate throwing out old tortillas, guess what TORTILLA SOUP.

The moral of this story, don't get carried away with recipes due to one ingredient sitting in your fridge that will end up in your freezer with freezer burn on it, because you are going to have to throw it away in six months anyway.

The Freezer's End.