#2 Cook'n

A lot of people do certain repetitive activities as a form of meditation: knitting; gardening; playing piano. I load recipes into my Cook'n database. It's not as time-consuming as it used to be, mostly because my recipes come from magazines like Living and Food & Wine and they keep their recipes online, so it's little more than cutting and pasting. Some recipes--say ones I clip from a newspaper or come from friends--need to be scanned.

This still takes time, I admit. And I have stacks of magazines I haven't been able to digitize yet. But I still think it's worthwhile. The program lets me sort recipes how I choose (I block them by source and year) and as far as I can tell, there's no limit to how many recipes you can store (I must have several hundred by now). It came preprogrammed with its own recipes, but I deleted all of those, because I wanted only to include recipes that I hand-picked. I can also attach bmp photos, which I love. I can search by ingredient (great for when I use one stalk of celery for tuna fish and have six stalks left over). And I can add my own notes, so after I try a recipe I can add things like "needs more salt" or "careful not to over bake." I also add my initials to a recipe once I've tried it, so I can remind myself later. It also makes it really easy to share recipes through email. And think of how easy it would be to pass on to future generations! Instead of a huge binder with papers jutting out everywhere, all I have to do is hand over a CD! What I also like is that when I'm making something, I can print out the recipe and it doesn't matter if I spill oil or gravy or jam on it, because I can always print out another one!

Today I added some recipes for a shrimp, crab and avocado salad; honey-roasted root vegetables; potato dill bread.