Pathetic Project #1

Have you ever suffered from a bout of restless procrastination? Maybe it’s just me. The list of things that need to be taken care of before our daughter comes is huge and growing it seems. Paint the room, fix little household things (that nail head that sticks up in the kitchen), rearrange furniture to make roof for the nursery. At one point I was going to can a years worth of homemade baby food in advance while we have the time.

There’s a thin thread of frantic energy running through our days, so what have I been focusing on? Culling our library of cooking magazines.

We now have three years plus of monthly cooking magazines filling up a shelf and a half in our kitchen. They’ve been great so far, providing inspiration when sautéed chicken and steamed broccoli just won’t do anymore. After a few years though, we started to pick up themes. Only so many things you can do with corn. Quite a few it turns out, but still a finite number. We weren’t getting much in the way of new ideas, and the recipes we put into heavy rotation were getting harder and harder to find. In the time it took to find the one magazine in our stack with that recipe for tofu chocolate mouse, I could have made and eaten it all.

The more organized of our friends (you know who you are) have blithely suggested simply clipping the recipes you like and create your own, “go-to” list. So Martha Stewart, so pure in its design.

Well it’s taken about three weeks, and I just finished our Cooking Light section. Not that hard it turns out, as apparently only women that want to read 15 pages on how to start walking subscribe to Cooking Light, or so the editors would have you believe. Half of each magazine could be tossed guilt free.

So we have a collection of torn out pages, with a disturbing lean towards deserts, that await a glue stick, perhaps some thematic color scheme, and some Spartan logical order. Oh and I also need to start in on the rest of our magazines. Maybe I could get an intern?