My dear friend, Ruth, surmised my dilemma a few years ago when I was trying to sort my collection of family recipe cards. “You are gonna need a bigger recipe box,” she said, matter of factly.
It was true. I didn’t think I was gonna need a bigger recipe box because I was going to purge my collection. However, I had recipe cards from all sorts of family members, including several grandmas, cousins, uncles, siblings and their respective broods. Plus, I had recipe cards from many friends (including Ruth), plus church and club members. They all seemed to think I was their personal repository for recipe cards (and maybe that was indeed true).
Yep, when all was said and done, Ruth was right: I really was gonna need a bigger recipe box. There were piles of recipe cards all over my dining room table for days as I tried to sort and cull all the recipes into some semblance of organization. Fortunately, since we rarely ate in the dining room anyway, I was able to let the recipe cards sit there for awhile before having to actually do anything with them. (My husband would walk by occasionally and shake his head; I don’t know why).
In the end, even though I admitted I was gonna need a bigger recipe box, I decided to develop a way to save the recipes without having to thumb through all those recipe cards. That’s how we created the search function in Matilda’s Fantastic Cookbook Software. It is a way to fight the “gonna need a bigger recipe box” syndrome. You can type in a recipe name in the search bar, and then find recipes within the software quite easily. We also carry a beautiful selection of recipe boxes sized for large and small recipe card collections.
The internet and World Wide Web ended up being a great “outside the box” solution to my “gonna need a bigger recipe box” problem.
What did I do with all my recipe cards, you ask? I kept them. Really. Somehow throwing away the hand-printed recipe cards seemed disloyal to those who gave them to me. So Ruth was right after all (as she often is). Seems like I’m still gonna need a bigger recipe box.
Happy Cookbooking,
Matilda
