The Binder
Currently while slicing:
Eating: tuna salad on toast
Drinking: ice water with lemon
Entertained by: Neighbors 2 on HBO
I love a good lazy Saturday afternoon, especially ones that follow a gig night. I play in a local country cover band and we had an exceptionally long night performing for a St. Patrick’s day crowd. I relish in these mornings of late wake ups, extra cups of coffee, sweatpants ‘til dinner plans, and doing a little sprucing around the house. In readying my house in advance for my parents’ arrival next week, I threw on the movie Neighbors 2 for some background entertainment as I began my cleaning. I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I’m cleaning I procrastinate subconsciously by multitasking on other projects on my to-do list at the same time. Arming myself with paper towels and a spray bottle of Fantastic, I cleaned each counter-top while also rearranging where all of the items were placed - Kurig, k-cup pods, toaster, crock-pot - they all have new houses now so to speak. In every home, there’s usually a storage spot - be it a closet, drawer, or cabinet - that is home to items we aren’t sure we need, yet we’ll never throw away (you’re picturing where yours is now, aren’t you?). In my kitchen, I had at least two of them. They were bottom cabinets adjacent to one another, and in them lived seasonal trays, cookbooks, miscellaneous dish ware, old bottles of liquor that have survived beyond expiration, and other odds and ends that I purchased with full intent on using but neglected to.
I made two piles: to throw out and to find a new storage for (I’ll be honest, I have every intent to do this with my closet, and peering over my shoulder at it from my living room through my open bedroom door as I type this I think: note to self... saving it for another lazy Saturday!). The throw out pile became extensive. Why was I saving that broken food processor again? Keeping expired powdered sugar was a good idea because...? And, really Tarah, are you really going to ever need Creme de Cassis? That last one I purchased after having dessert at one of those Brazilian Steakhouses and they added that to their ice cream. The taste was unforgettable, but apparently the bottle I bought was not.
The last item I grabbed was a one-inch binder that contained paper copies of recipes I had been given over time, were written by hand, or printed off the internet.
Ready for the toss pile, I thought. Then it occurred to me. Why not flip through and take pictures of any pages I might want to refer back to someday? I picked myself off the floor slowly and brought the binder over to my dining table. Sitting there, I opened the binder and thumbed through six dividers - each sectioned into starters, entrees, desserts, and broken down by protein/food category in the entree section. This was something I put together long before there were food apps to curate and filter your taste desires; before bookmarking was a thing, and well before Ben Silbermann conjured up Pinterest. I made this binder when I began my cooking journey. The oldest pages in it are from my high school Senior Foods that I held on to in case I needed nostalgia in making Quick Breads, Chicken Parmesan, or (my favorite pasta dish) Farfalle Leonardo (you know it’s a keeper because it was highlighted, starred, and check-marked by my 17 year old self! See image of recipe at the end of this post). Although it wasn’t something that could be bought, these pages were my first cookbook.
Perhaps the most comical page I held on to, not because I wanted to remember the information, but more for the sentiment of the past was one called “Mister Beefy”. In Senior Foods, we had a unit about the cuts of meat, and as you can see from my notes, I was really skilled at copying down everything about the varieties, ways to tenderize, and how to prepare beef... probably all via an overhead projector in a dark room of rowed desks.
Did I remember anything between writing it down in class, walking away, adding it to the binder, and letting time do it’s thing? Absolutely not. At that time, the information wasn’t applicable to me to store in long term memory. You can also tell the importance it held for me at the time by the head, tail, and “moo” talk bubble I added to the beef diagram. At home, the cuts of meat were left to my dad to purchase and prepare, and the only dish that I would make that I transferred from Foods class then were cheese omelettes.
I took the pictures of my favorite pages, and closed the binder. With the mix of the past sinking in and Seth Rogan crying in the final scene of Neighbors 2, I felt tears swell in my eyes. I haven’t found a new home for the binder, and even though I have digital copies, I cannot part with this physical connection to my past.
For those of you that I went to Naperville North that have stumbled on this post that took this class, I'd love to know what recipes you remember making like the one here that stood out to me the most!
