Moussaka, not by the book.
Photograph: Robert Brook on flickr, some rights reservedAre you a cut-out-and-keep recipe hoarder? Or does your cooking library consist of bookshelves stacked in orderly fashion, or perhaps nothing more than a set of bookmarks in your web browser ("favourites" for Explorer users, you sad lot)?
We have an old-fashioned black ring binder crammed with magazine and newspaper clippings.
It is pretty heavy on Guardian and Observer content, despite Waz's grumbling that it look likes we are keeping a scrapbook on Nigel Slater.
For our video blog/podcast we've been known to test out the proverbial "recipe we found on the web", sometimes cutting corners where excess faffery seems to be involved, or looking up several alternatives and pulling these together around a core of ingredients that are common to all the sources, in an attempt at producing a representative example of the dish. Like the pretzels we made for this post (you won't get that title if you've never watched Seinfeld). Our version of the recipe goes into a Word file on our computer, in a folder, somewhere under My Documents ...
But our day-to-day eating comes mainly out of that black folder. I leave Waz a note saying something like "Sausage and butter bean casserole, BF (black folder)" (thanks Nigel). Waz has to thumb through the folder for the recipe, flush out the ingredients from our crowded fridge and haphazard pantry - I find this to be the sort of simple challenge he really enjoys - then get it on the table by the time I get home from work.
So whose trimmings are you eating? What does your folder or scrapbook look like? Was it handed down from your grandmother? Is it a collection of clippings interspersed with recipes dictated across friends' dinner tables and jotted down on serviettes? Strewn all over, or kept in a tidy expanding file like this?
And whatever its shape, how the hell do you index the thing?
