Some server downtime at work the past several days has inspired me to organize my recipe box. I know that doesn’t make sense, but while our servers were down, I had some time to spend browsing the only website we can access at work: our own. I stumbled upon a recipe section and started printing off new ideas to add to my already overflowing and unorganized recipe box. It made me realize that I’ve not been cooking enough lately! Well, not exactly that we’ve not been cooking, just that the spice and variety of what we’ve been cooking for meals lately has gone stale. All of the recipes I’ve come across over the past couple of days has inspired me to remedy that by pulling out my old recipe box fresh from storage in Indiana and formatting all of my old recipes to be online and digitally accessible. My hope is that formatting them will cause me to “find” recipes I’d forgotten I had, and in turn, revitalize our plates with something “new.”
When I first moved to Calgary I had a lot of time on my hands. The first thing I had shipped up to me was my slow cooker. I was using it several times a week for awhile, trying out new recipes with all that spare time I had. Then I ran out of ideas and got into my sewing. Now that I’m back to work full time, I’ve noticed a definite decline in my motivation to cook a nice, full meal beyond Hamburger Helper or perogies. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with Hamburger Helper or perogies, but we definitely need variety, that spice of life, to juice things up a bit. And while coming home after a long day at work leaves little room for motivation to invent or try out new recipes, I thought if I organized all of the recipes I’ve been squirreling away over the years, not only would it refresh my memory of what possibilities we have to choose from, but it’ll also make it easier to plan ahead so that cooking won’t seem like such a chore when we get home from work.

What does this mean for you? Well I’d like to make our recipes accessible to anyone online. I’d like to share the plethora of recipes that I’ve collected over the years with anyone that is interested in them. Some are original, some are recipes that have been passed down through my family, some I’ve found in books or on other websites, and some are old favorites that I don’t even know where they came from. Just a collection. And when we add recipes to the collection after trying them out, I’d like to share them here and highlight what we did. Eventually I’ll add photos. Hopefully this is the first step towards revitalizing our dinner table, and yours. We’ve gotten started adding recipes to our new Recipe Page, but it will be a fairly slow and lengthy process converting all of my scraps of paper over, so be patient! There’s around 30 recipes there now and we’ll continue to add more here and there until every single recipe I have is up. Whew! Enjoy :)