One of my early retirement projects is to go through all the miscellaneous boxes and files we have stowed in various locations around the house. For me, starting in the guest room/home office/exercise studio/etc. space was a no-brainer. Although I "see" them every morning when I do my yoga and meditation, I recently realized that I haven't actually looked at the banker boxes we have stacked on the high shelves in there for years.
Lifting the lid on one of them, I found a recipe archive spanning 1989-2008. It had folders and binders filled with clippings from the NY Times, Fine Cooking, Cooks Illustrated, and Saveur, as well as printed pages from the early days of internet recipe searches, some handwritten gems, and some photocopies from cooking demos I had attended (and taught) over the years.
While not exactly a treasure chest worth preserving as a whole, the collection did seem to me to merit a look at each page before ultimately relegating 85 percent of them to the recycling bag. Most were dishes I had never cooked, just recipes that seemed promising. Many still looked pretty good, and I was charmed to see some of the signature ingredients from that time featured so prominently: lamb shanks, cod, sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, bacon, and all manner of gratins and souffles.
There were also some original copies of recipes that we have loved over the years, which, of course, I kept. And I also kept almost anything that I had actually made before. And when I was through with the the task, not only did I still have at least 50 recipes, but I also had a short list of follow-up chores, such as organize and file them and actually cook them or get rid of them.
All of which tells me? This project is bigger than I originally thought.
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