Baby Steps

After mentioning my rib rub mixture the other day, I decided to make some more and went on a search for the recipe.  Now, along with the baby steps in organizing my life such as this blog vs. daily thoughts on pieces of paper and pictures which never coalesce into any form, I keep a file on my computer of all my recipes (well, mine and others).

It's really nice.  Under recipes I have set up files for "Baking", "Beef", "Chicken, eggs, etc.", "Drinks", "Fish", "Fruits", "Lamb, curries, etc", well you get the idea.  I love it, no more oddball pieces of paper to corral!  And I can paste a photo onto the recipe, something that never happens with scraps of paper.  I started doing this when I made a cookbook in 1992 to give to family and friends for Christmas.  Then I slacked off and years went by.  About 2 years ago, I took the cookbook files and as I sort through the forest of papers that has become my life, I type up any recipes that surface and scan the pics into the computer, then toss the paper.  It's quite freeing and is fabulous when you want a recipe...no more digging through piles of paper and magazines!

Now there still are some glitches in my system, such as when I'm developing a recipe.  I wind up with a collection of print outs from recipe sites and then take the most common ingredients used across all plus a few extra things I think might work.  I make notes all over them as I go about what to try in the next batch.  Till I finalize it, it doesn't go in the computer.

It seems that's the fate of my rub recipe which I've been futzing with for about 8 months now.  It is not in my file!!!  Eek!  I just about "had" it down!  (Minor hissy fit here...)  Drats!  Okay, well I won't be sharing the rub "in the works" with you today.  Suffice it to say, it's a better system than before, but still needs some tweaking.