Saturday, January 2, 2010

New Year, New Recipes

I'll admit it. I have a thing for magazines. There's something about those glossy pages covered in a collage of type print and photographs that steals my attention and keeps it on lock down as I turn them over, one at a time, soaking in the articles and advertisements. There's a calming euphoria in it for me that I can't quite explain. Granted, not all mags have the same kind of effect on me. Field and Stream, for example, doesn't particularly transfix me. Neither do Parenting nor Car and Driver get me to that special state which I associate with my favorite periodicals.

So my affection for magazines has led to an increasingly cumbersome pile of those of the recipe and cooking variety. I absolutely adore opening the mailbox to one of the slim journals wrapped in plastic that I subscribe to. I need this monthly dose of food news. I realize that from an environmental standpoint, I'm committing a somewhat heinous crime by supporting deforestation, but I just can't help it.

When my collection began, nearly two years ago, I decided that I would mark the pages containing recipes that appealed to me with a little blue sticky note. Then I could easily flip to these pages later. That system worked pretty darn well for a few months, but soon I had no idea what recipes were in which magazines, making it impossible to recover specific ones. So many amazing recipes were forgotten. Tragic.

I decided a few days ago to flip through all of the old Vegetarian Times and Bon Appetits and Eating Wells to brush the dust from these abandoned cooking instructions and give them another shot at life in my kitchen. What a gold mine! I'm not even half way done yet, and already I have an enormous stack of clippings with titles like "Butternut Squash-Bartlett Pear Soup", "Chocolate Pecan Pudding pie", and "Cumin-Cayenne Mashed Potatoes with Caramelized Onions". I keep having to wipe drool off the pages as I sort and scissor through these wordy, soon-to-be-dishes. This year is looking to be a great one full of kitchen adventures. I can't wait to start cooking.

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