recipes.
One summer, my mother gave me a task that would require hours of work, extreme organization, and most importantly, a deep, abiding love for recipes. Her giant yellow 3-ring binder was bursting with recipes that had at one time been organized. The binder had tabs for breads, salads, meats, and all the usual recipe categories, and was stuffed with handwritten notecards, torn pages of magazines, and computer printouts. It had ceased to be a useful reference book, and had become a recipe graveyard. My job was to somehow make sense of it all. And after several days of covering the kitchen table with recipes, making stacks of faded magazine and newspaper clippings that referenced similar food groups, I presented my mother with the yellow binder, now able to open and close, as well as a separate dessert collection, my own idea. Using an old photo album, I stuffed dessert recipes in the pockets, and tried to organize them by cookies, cakes and pies. Now that there were two functioning ...