FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Restoring order in the recipe drawer

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

Having stripped my overloaded cupboard of spices that had lost their ability to "kick it up a notch," I turned my attention while I was off for a few days last week to a space in my kitchen that's stuffed with newspaper and magazine clippings, 5-by-7 cards, scraps of paper and stained and shredding notebooks: the recipe drawer. You know, the one that won't shut half the time because one of those stray slips of paper has gotten crumpled up in the back?

If you don't think this is a problem, type "recipe organizer" into Google.com; 33,900 responses later, you'll see that entrepreneurial types have given this seemingly inconsequential matter much thought. Here at The Advertiser, I know almost without looking that any Taste section e-mail with "Help!" in the subject field is from some desperate soul who has misplaced a favorite.

Grandma had an old-fashioned school exercise book in which to write her recipes in fading fountain-pen ink. My mom favored typewritten alphabetized index cards. One of my best friends, a graphic designer, has a template on her computer for recording recipes and prints them out for her 5-by-7 recipe box, with extras for sharing. (A sheaf of her favorites came with an invitation to view her recently remodeled kitchen — an excellent gift idea.) My mom's boyfriend is proud of the recipe software he's purchased, with indexing and easy print-out features.

But whatever method you employ, there's work and time involved, which explains why all those bits and pieces tend to float around the kitchen and turn up lost when you really need them. After absolutely tearing the kitchen apart during Christmas to find a vanished pie recipe, I decided I had to get a grip again.

So I bought a large, spiral-bound, lined blank notebook in which to consolidate the whole mess and spent five days alternately gaping at daytime TV (like a quick trip to another planet) and writing, writing, writing. The only papers I kept were handwritten recipes from beloved relatives (Aunt Gladys' Sweet Potato Pie, my mom's Exotic Chicken Curry and some drop-dead Lemon Cupcakes from a far-removed relative).

Now I can't wait to revisit some of the recipes I rediscovered — and to fill the drawer once again with scraps and clippings.