When I have friends over for an afternoon tea or such, you might think we all sit around a linen-clad table with our gloves on, daintily testing the tepidness of the tea before we drink. NOT.

When I have friends over for afternoon tea or such, they all bring their Wi-Fi laptops and other connected devices.

When I have friends over for afternoon tea or such, we sit around my kitchen table and chat about the week’s events, check emails and/or texts, and search out more information about topics we are discussing. Often we find ourselves talking about arts and crafts, scrapbooking, sewing, home decorating, and recipes. We always talk about recipes, recipe books, recipe cards and other ways to store those precious memories of good food we have with our families.

When I have friends over for afternoon tea or such, we sometimes work on our cookbooks together using my Matilda’s Fantastic Cookbook Software (yes, all my friends have it, my goodness, I am the CEO — chief encouragement officer!) Sometimes we pull cookbooks down from my kitchen shelves and pick an easy recipe to make then and there (assuming I have the ingredients on hand). Which brings me to my next thought.

When I have friends over for afternoon tea or such, sometimes we invent stuff.

Like the time we thought it would be great to have a device like a stretchy abacus that you could put on a plastic water bottle to help track how many bottles or ounces of water you drank each day (after 3 or 4 bottles I forget, don’t you?).

We recently came up with another idea. We were picking recipes to try from a few cookbooks, and decided to create a full week of daily menus, along with a shopping list of ingredients. It was easy to type the recipes into Matilda’s Fantastic Cookbook Software and print them out for all of us. It was even easy to create a shopping list by cutting and pasting the ingredients from each recipe into a word document, and after a little clean up and sorting, make a grocery list. 

During the aforementioned recipe-picking and menu-making exercise, we thought how great it would be to have a kitchen tool that would scan a food item’s barcode and automatically create an in/out inventory of your pantry shelves. The device might also track how frequently an item is used. (It is a bit embarrassing to discover you bought another can of cream of mushroom soup for your growing soup collection that is apparently stashed in five different places.) Then the tool should also be able to talk to a computer and print a list of depleted items in your pantry so your grocery list is always up to date.

Maybe that’s just too organized.

No matter. When I have friends over for afternoon tea or such, we do enjoy our laptops and lumps, and the friendship we share together.

Happy Cookbooking,

Matilda