Kitchen diary, resumptive
Jan. 22nd, 2014 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceHmm. It's not easy, being living with me. As witness and exempli gratia, every now and then m'wife will say "That was really good, that [dish] you made [a matter of days] ago. You'll have to do that for me again." To which I will say one of two things: either (a) "If I can ever remember what I did, sure"; or (b) "If I can ever remember which book that recipe came from, sure".
Which those of you who know me will already have recognised the problem here. As witness and exempli gratia, I made a cheese bread on Monday. This morning K said she would like it if I did that again. It has taken me half a day to remember where that came from, and that's after less than two days.
I do have strategies in place: I have catalogued all my books at Eat Your Books, which means half my recipes are now indexed online with lists of ingredients and everything; I have this kitchen diary. But I don'talways often remember to record the day's culinary adventures here; and I do often find ideas or recipes online; and... yeah.
What I need is a reliable system, an absolute record: "today I made this from here and that from there, and I made up this other thing thuswise." This journal was kind of meant to do that, but I don't think it's gonna; it sits too solidly within my blogging-when-I-think-of-it habit, rather than a nightly exercise of will.
There must be a way to do this in Evernote, I'm guessing? Possibly by, y'know, using Evernote to do this. A searchable self-indexing database, effectively: "Cheese bread: Jacques Pepin's Art of Cooking, vol 2". Like that. Every time I cook anything from an actual recipe.
And when I don't? Well, maybe Evernote and maybe here. Like this evening. On Monday I cooked a ham (which I brined myself, yay me) for the yogi, and served it with a mushroom-and-parsley sauce; yesterday I roasted a chicken for Mark and us, and served it with a tarragon sauce. Today I am making a chicken-and-ham pie, and I am thinking there is no reason on this good earth why I shouldn't mix the leftover parsley & mushroom with the leftover tarragon sauces, as a basis for the gravy in the pie. And I should keep a record of that, just in case K likes it. Not that it would be exactly repeatable, because circumstances; but I could certainly make such a gravy from scratch, next time around. If I had a note to tell me why she liked it.
Which those of you who know me will already have recognised the problem here. As witness and exempli gratia, I made a cheese bread on Monday. This morning K said she would like it if I did that again. It has taken me half a day to remember where that came from, and that's after less than two days.
I do have strategies in place: I have catalogued all my books at Eat Your Books, which means half my recipes are now indexed online with lists of ingredients and everything; I have this kitchen diary. But I don't
What I need is a reliable system, an absolute record: "today I made this from here and that from there, and I made up this other thing thuswise." This journal was kind of meant to do that, but I don't think it's gonna; it sits too solidly within my blogging-when-I-think-of-it habit, rather than a nightly exercise of will.
There must be a way to do this in Evernote, I'm guessing? Possibly by, y'know, using Evernote to do this. A searchable self-indexing database, effectively: "Cheese bread: Jacques Pepin's Art of Cooking, vol 2". Like that. Every time I cook anything from an actual recipe.
And when I don't? Well, maybe Evernote and maybe here. Like this evening. On Monday I cooked a ham (which I brined myself, yay me) for the yogi, and served it with a mushroom-and-parsley sauce; yesterday I roasted a chicken for Mark and us, and served it with a tarragon sauce. Today I am making a chicken-and-ham pie, and I am thinking there is no reason on this good earth why I shouldn't mix the leftover parsley & mushroom with the leftover tarragon sauces, as a basis for the gravy in the pie. And I should keep a record of that, just in case K likes it. Not that it would be exactly repeatable, because circumstances; but I could certainly make such a gravy from scratch, next time around. If I had a note to tell me why she liked it.