Incidentally, when I came home from Target last night I was putting stuff away in the bathroom and glanced in the mirror. There was a big chunk of charred marshmallow stuck to the corner of my mouth. BRAVO!

I am on yet another new mission. Target's end caps are really my downfall. I checked the stationery section and there was a Mead notebook set, a 5 divider notebook AND a personal notebook, all wrapped in lovely, enticing cellophane, just one left, begging me to take it home, like a puppy at the pet store. They had nice cushy covers over the wire binder and durable plastic covers for the rest. I immediately scavenged my brain for a suitable use. It took no time to decide that this big notebook would become the salvation for my hopelessly disorganized recipe collection. Here's how it will work. Every day I MUST make a recipe. I shall begin with the tried and true. Once we eat it and confirm that it is, indeed, a winner, the recipe will immediately be transferred to the new notebook. I shall take my sticky roller, Removable Dot 'N Go Glue Dots, if you must, and pin the recipe to a page. Of course, with 5 divisions, this shall be a snap to get organized. And, BINGO!, everything will be contained in one yummy Mead notebook, easy as pie. The personal book, I don't know, I need to jot all my writing ideas in one comfortable spot. Presently, they are written on millions of pieces of paper littering the desk. Consolidation, this is the plan.

Yesterday Mike went to the health food store and he brought me back something made by a little company called Blake's. I think they are in New England, where people work hard. They make their recipes in small batches, by hand, old family recipes. I'm telling you, their stuff is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD! This frozen entree was a new one to me, Mac 'N Beef. I baked it up in the oven and boy, oh, boy was it GOOOOOOOOOOD!
Of course, I could have eaten 4 containers of it, the portions are suitable for someone on a fast, it's like eating nothing. But one can't afford to eat 4 containers, the stuff ain't cheap. Previously, I've had their chicken pot pie, which is chicken in a brothy sauce to die for, and crust. No vegetables in sight, The Little Rabbit that would not Eat would make a beeline for that one. The other was Shepherd's Pie, again, just mashed potatoes and ground beef.

Well, the mac 'n beef was so perfect that I decided to read the ingredients. Just good old-fashioned real food like crushed tomatoes and green pepper. Isn't that just so refreshing? So, I thought I could duplicate that and I did and it was pretty close. If I had simmered the tomato sauce longer, reduced it, I think it would have been just right, and maybe thrown in some brown sugar, eh? This, my friends, shall be the first recipe in my new system. It's good old family cooking, the only kind I'm interested in. And it was fun to make because I "eyeballed" it, that's how the Amish cook, you know.

Just think, if I cook something every day, like that Julie in the Julia Child's story, and like myself, the blogger, who more or less blogs every day, I shall have a Notebook of Best Loved Recipes by next Thanksgiving. It's a good thing I heard a big time chef say that the home cook tries too many different kinds of recipes and she should rather master a few. My sentiments exactly. I'm telling you, I have favorite recipes and they could be in any of a multitude of places. I can never put my finger on most of them. Like the Sally Lunn bread from my boarding school. That was only served on special occasions, like Armistice Day. We'd eat scrambled egg sandwiches (on cheap white bread) with ketchup down at the point of the lake. Then we'd have this melt-in-your mouth Sally Lunn bread. It was really more like cake/muffin and we ate it with apple butter. You never tasted anything so good in your life. Miss Andy was responsible for this recipe, or Miss Clement, they no doubt put their two lovely heads together and tweaked it over the years. So, after decades of drooling to savor Sally Lunn once again, someone graciously provided the recipe at a reunion. Yep, I have the recipe, but where on earth is it?

It could be in my stuffed-to-the-gills recipe box. Or it could be in a long forgotten file in the laundry room. Maybe it is in my notebook with plastic sleeves in the buffet. Or it could be in the drawer in the little side table serving as night stand in the guest room. Perhaps it's upstairs in any number of random files, boxes and baskets. For all I know it got mixed in with the ample Taste sections from the newspaper, the piles yellowing and crisping. Wow, I'd better quit this train of thought, I'm going to become utterly defeated before I even glue dot my first entry. Actually, I have a similar recipe for beef 'n mac, courtesy of Ruby Tester. Boy, could she cook. They had a huge home garden and she canned and all that. Now, these two similar recipes need to go on the same page, wouldn't you say?

So, unearthing my favorites is going to be interesting. Everything is interesting to me, just about, this is my problem. Lots of the newspaper stories are so interesting. So is AOL. And email, of course. What is not interesting to me are modern movies and television. BIG YAWN, by and large. This takes so much time, to be genuinely interested in almost everything. But when I find Sally Lunn (a lot like Linn, eh?, if I'm spelling it correctly), she is going to go in the pan.

Yesterday for the bonfire I made chocolate chip cookies. But they never made it out the door. I said to Mike, These cookies are greasy, see-thru, crumbly, and if that's not enough they're sketchy on the choco chip equation, maybe I shouldn't take them. He said, No, you shouldn't take them. Then he revealed, Those cookies are good. AHA! So, my mastermind puts together that he had snitched a cookie and didn't want me to take them because he wanted them all for himself at home. So we took a bag of chips instead. But at least they were lime cilantro chips.

My cookies were greasy because I made them with substitute ingredients. No egg. Handy I had just read on AOL a few days ago that if you don't have an egg, grind up some flax seed and add some water, let it sit for a few, PRESTO!, you have flax-egg, same consistency and everything as egg-egg. How about me having flax seed sitting around forever? Then my brown sugar was petrified, so I had to sub cane sugar. Then my chocolate chip supply, I found, had been drastically diminished, by DTD, I suspect. PLUS, I was cutting the recipe in half and whenever I do that it's highly questionable which ingredients were cut in half in the real world and which were cut in half in good intentions only. Using two sticks of butter in half a recipe would be fatal. I don't think I did that, but then again, these WERE extra greasy. I'm getting queasy just studying the matter.

Okay, all my heady ideas are exhausating (see, I can't spell, I spelled that like nauseating, almost, which I'm also getting nauseated from the Calcium and Vitamin D tablets I picked up on the pills end cap at Target, I just took them, they aren't agreeable), not to mention cooking on a HARD TILE FLOOR exhausts me. I'm telling you what, we have to move to that little cottage with soft, forgiving wood floors. But I am excited to get my recipes together. Isn't the human spirit just indomitable? Never mind my life is well on it's way to over, I'm going to turn into June Cleaver if it's the last thing I do, even if it kills me.

Looking ahead, not back,
KEM