Solutions.

Today I have been updating my recipe scrapbook. (There I go, like a Victorian lady with my scrapbook!) I don't buy recipe books any longer. I have one or two old favourites that I keep and a couple more that were bought for me as presents and which it would seem churlish to throw out. Never let it be said that I might be a churl! But in the case of most recipe books I bought over the years I found that I was using maybe one recipe and that was all. So I kept a copy of the one recipe and sent the books off to a charity shop. And that, more or less, is when the recipe scrapbook began. 

Most weekends we buy newspapers, a proper printed version. The rest of the week we read the papers online but the weekend has to be marked out as special in some way and this is one of our ways. Besides, it would be impossible to get on with life if we tried to read a whole newspaper every day of the week. In the weekend papers there is usually a cookery page, sometimes several pages, sometimes a whole cookery supplement. I always scan this for ideas and it then follows a process of elimination. 

If a recipe attracts my interest, I will cut out that page and stack it with other cuttings for review later. Closer inspection will make me remove some recipes because they include ingredients that can only be obtained if you live in the great metropolis. No doubt all these esoteric ingredients would be available somewhere in greater Manchester but it's rarely worth making a long expedition just for an experimental cookery session. 

Then I consider the practicality of the recipe. How realistic is it that I will spend as long as the recipe calls for in preparation? How likely is it that Phil will eat the dish once prepared? This last has led to the ruling out of many a recipe with too much cooked cheese. Cooked cheese is a serious no-no in our house. I do keep recipes with a bit of goat's cheese grilled on top and just serve up one section of it without the cheese. 

Any recipe that looks as though it is never likely to be tried out has to end up in the bin. Eventually, if a recipe appears to be a "keeper", out come the scissors and the glue stick and it is added to the scrapbook. A rather haphazard scrapbook, it has to be said. Dessert recipes are side by side with soups and meat dishes. Properly printed recipe books have different sections for each type of course. Not so my homemade version although it has got to the point where I have a kind of index so that recipes can be found in a hurry. Some of the charm of such a book, however, is leafing through and rediscovering recipes you have forgotten about, recipes with memories attached, such as the ones I have tried out on friends. That's how you discover that certain friends will not eat, for example, parsnips, not on any account or in any mode of preparation! 

The first version of the scrapbook had to be cannibalised and the salvageable pages put into a new book as the first one had become so splattered with gravy and sauce and such a variety of ingredients that it truly was becoming a health hazard. Not the sort of thing you really want to have in your kitchen. From that original scrapbook I preserved a recipe for ginger wine, handwritten by my mother. Her ginger wine, I hasten to add, is non-alcoholic but it was always very good if fortified with a little whisky or brandy. Interestingly, the list of ingredients begins with a number of items that have the instruction to "get the above made up at the chemists". I wonder if chemists still provide this service. Sometime before next Christmas I will try it out. It was always just before Christmas that she made her batch of ginger wine. 

What I don't have, although I am pretty sure I used to, is her ginger beer recipe, another non-alcoholic beverage. It was usually referred to as a ginger beer "plant" and needed feeding with sugar and ground ginger until bottling time came along. I know that I once had the recipe because many years ago I had a batch go noisily wrong. Somewhere in the process of straining the mix to get rid of the yeast, some of that yeast was left in and we were woken in the small hours of a summer morning to the sound of corks blowing out of bottles and hitting the underside of the kitchen units. What's more, the yeast that had made it continue to ferment also made the brew taste foul! Maybe that's why the recipe disappeared. 

Anyway, the recipe scrapbook is now up to date again. An amazingly large amount of paper is now being recycled! But at least it's not a whole book, bought on impulse and never used. 

Finally, here is a link to an article giving a solution to the Vietnamese children's maths problem I mentioned the other day. I didn't understand a word of it. Well, I exaggerate. If I had sat down and really studied it and dredged up my old O Level maths equation solving skills I might have understood it. 

In the end I decided life is too short for that sort of thing and I went back to rereading books I read years ago. Oh, and sorting recipes. Much more satisfying!