Preservation - The menu of my life

I am sometimes very apprehensive about the future - mostly because it seems so scary and dark. A few Christmases ago I had a major anxiety attack. I could not for the life of me bring myself to buy wrapping paper, cards and bows, etc. at the 75% discount after the Holidays. I was convinced I wasn't going to see the following Christmas. Well, Mike's mother took it upon herself to buy all the good stuff and I was very grateful and it came in handy the following year.

I went through the same thing when making the decision to open a retirement account. I did it of course; just in case....

Which leads me to my new project:

I have a manila folder on a shelf below all my cookbooks in the kitchen bursting open with printed out recipes from the Food Network, Cooks.com, etc. I print them out when I go recipe browsing and shove them in this folder. There's also a lot of tried and true favorites in there. The folder is crusty with food drippings and the most often used recipes are torn and have some grease spots on them. LoL. There's also some recipes jotted down on scrap that mom has given me over the phone that are hardly legible.

So last night I grabbed the folder and started plucking out all the tried and true favorites. I grabbed my laptop and starting retyping them in my choice of recipe language and added my own modifications including the source or creator of the recipe.

My favorite thing about it is that I added a History line which would look like this if you were looking at my recipe for Mocha sweethearts:

History: I made Mike these for our first Valentine's Day together (2005) while I was living in Philadelphia. I made them again for Valentine's Day in 2007, our first Valentine's Day living together in NJ.

I'm excited to put these all in a three ring binder separated by course and insert all the sheets in plastic sleeves - preserve them while preserving my life with food. We all have soundtracks to our lives - this is the menu of my life.

I'm also excited to decoupage and seal the binder. Who knows? Maybe I'll have children some day and I can't imagine a better gift to pass down than a lifetime's worth of favorite recipes and memories.