{Mission} Top 20 recipes

Late last year I went through my recipe flipfiles which, by the way, have greatly reduced over the years.

You can have the most organised recipes but if you’re not using them, they’re clutter.

photo

I was even more brutal than I normally am (must be able to cook within 30 minutes) and tossed out LOTS that I am even more certain I’ll never make due to vast amounts of fat or sugar, or ingredients I’m probably not going to get, just for a recipe.

Some of my “rules”:

  1. I won’t cook anything that calls for more than a cup of sugar. If the measurement is close (1 and a third, or 1 and a half), I’ll just do 1.
  2. I never cook anything with more than half a cup of butter.
  3. quick for weeknight suppers

I now have a nicely organised flipfile of our family’s current favourite 20 or so recipes. Some of them are even in my virtual recipe book. Some of the recipes have had to be tossed because there’s really no point in making things the kids don’t eat. I have fantastic eaters so if someone really doesn’t enjoy fruit in their food, it’s not a big deal (pineapple chicken, apricot chicken, etc.) 🙂

Of course, all that organising triggered some forgotten memories so I checked the pantry and freezer, and then added some things to the shopping list (one meal every week because I’m actually trying to keep to the grocery budget) and so we’ve had some nice “new” meals too.

Do you keep a recipe file or do you know your family’s favourites so well you never need a reminder?

This weekend, I’d like to challenge you to go through your recipes and try and toss the ones you know you’re never going to make.

Bonus points if you go through your Pinterest recipes too 🙂

{Mission} Try 25 new recipes

Last year I set myself a goal to actually try 25 new recipes from Pinterest and old-fashioned clippings from magazines, instead of just pinning them.

The project was a huge success.

I tried 32 new recipes. There may be a couple more that I forgot to write down.

I think the reason this project was so successful is that I gave it a specific number goal so I couldn’t flake out, I had to be more or less consistent. I definitely did at least one every month, most months two, and some months I tried as many as five recipes.

Of those 32, 14 were so fantastic we added them to our usual rotation…. and I’ve made a new Pinterest board, “my virtual recipe book“.

My virtual recipe book - Mozilla Firefox 20140116 104825 PM.bmp

The best thing of course was that we added new tastes and flavours to our meals we might never have tried had I not had this project as a goal.

It is a bit of a mission (!) but it’s worth it…. and FUN (if you like cooking and/ or baking).

Have you done a project like this before?

Next project for me is to focus on something different every month – I just had a squiz through my baking board and I have a clear number of categories – lemon, cinnamon, apple, breads….. 🙂

But before I do that, I want to go through that board and declutter the ones I definitely won’t ever be making.

Pinterest has always mainly been for me a place to organise the many wonderful posts I come across so that I can take action; it’s never been just inspiration..

Now for one of the easiest “recipes” that will delight your children.

IMG_4287

these are the ones we have at home. Oh by the way, the twins were whispering secrets to one another that I was not allowed to hear 🙂

Yoghurt pops (ice lollies)

I buy a tub of yoghurt, something with “interest”, like any berry/ caramel/ apricot, that sort of thing. For some reason, the kids don’t really enjoy the plain and the vanilla yoghurt pops that much 😉

Pour the yoghurt as is into ice lolly containers and freeze. If you don’t have any containers (I’m on holiday at the moment and don’t have anything) use either little bowls or the 100 ml yoghurts as is, but I stick a spoon in the yoghurt before freezing.

Within a few hours, you have yoghurt pops. For the ones with spoons, I remove from the freezer at the start of lunch and let them defrost just a bit while the kids have their lunch. After 10 minutes or so, they’re the perfect consistency as normal frozen yoghurt.

100% better for your kids than ice-cream but serves the same purpose.

Enjoy!

11 [31 days] how do you organise your recipes?

pinkbeary says:
how do you organize your recipes?

The answer is quite complicated (but worth it) so hang in there 🙂

 

I used to use plastic display files (Flipfiles) to organise my recipes and I had one for main recipes, one for baking/ desserts and one for recipes to try.

The problem seemed to be that 1) I wasn’t getting to any of them and was just cooking our favourites except for special occasions and 2) our tastes kept getting fussier and fussier.

On number 2 above, since the babies (my two-year-old twins) started eating our food at 1 year, I cook much healthier (!) so less fatty, more veggie-laden meals. And I was a healthy cook to start!

I have found since I pin things on Pinterest, the recipes are all easily accessible and when I’ve made some of those pinned recipes, I takemy netbook to the kitchen counter, click through and start cooking/ baking. So there’s no need to print out very much anymore.

Bonus – kinder for the environment, less for me to file! LOL

The paper in my kitchen has been bugging me though so this evening I took all of my flipfiles and I made a couple of piles:

I tossed all the recipes that realistically, I would never make – isn’t this picture so satisfying?! Freedom!

I thought you’d like to see my sandals that my son, Connor, is quite taken with, I think because of the blue beads 🙂 (I paid about R40 – R50 at Mr Price 3 – 4 years ago, if not longer)

Then I made some new piles:

  1. Our family favourites
  2. Recipes to try – mains
  3. Recipes to try – baking and desserts

 

This year I set a goal to try at least 2 new recipes every month on my 37 things list (I make a list on my birthday in August every year).

So far, so good, even though it’s been very loosey-goosey and I’ve scrambled in the last week of the month for the last two months.

If any of the recipes become family favourites, I’ll move them from their current flipfiles to the family favourites one (which only has about 6 recipes at the moment). Haven’t had any of those yet except for the one below.

This month, and for the rest of the year til Aug 2012, I’m going to choose one recipe to try every weekend so that if it doesn’t work out at the last minute, there’s no scramble to make my goal for the end of the month.

I’ve already made The Most Delicious Pumpkin Bread (we don’t have canned pumpkin here in South Africa so I used 500g and it was perrrrrrrfect). It was so good I’m going to make another batch because we all polished it off and I didn’t even get any pictures.

So, how do you organise your recipes?

And are there any “must-try” recipes you want to recommend to me?

Remember they’ve got to be relatively healthy and I don’t spend more than 30 minutes tops in the kitchen 🙂

 

 

Feature Friday – menu planning

Feature Friday is an occasional highlight of something that works in my home/ life.

I love menu planning.

It saves me such a lot of time and helps us all to eat healthier and shop better for groceries.

Here is my favourite little magnetic menu planning board (South Africans, I got it for R30 at Mega Mica about 3 years ago and it’s not actually intended for menu planning – I think it’s for kids’ homework).

I start off by cleaning the whole thing.

I then check my freezer and see if there’s anything I want to use up or if there are freezer meals that need eating.

Add those to the board.

Then I make sure we don’t eat any one carb two nights in a row (I like to switch things every night).

I only plan for Mon – Fri and on Saturdays and Sundays we fly by the seat of our pants.

Not really, I just felt like saying that.

We usually use up any leftovers or I’ll do the quickest thing which is a pasta.

Notice our meals are on top and the babies’ meals are on the bottom of the squares.

The babies eat what we had for supper the previous night since they eat at 5 pm and I’m not even home from work then. Except when we have spicy meals like curries.

And that’s it.

Easy-peasy menu planning.

 

I don’t consult a lot of recipe books except when I’m uninspired which is fairly rare because I do love food.

I have set myself a little goal this year though; I’m to try two new meals every month. Of course, all these new things are always cooked on the weekends which is the only time I have more than 30 minutes to spend in the kitchen.

Do you menu plan?

Do you cook the same things or do you like trying new recipes?

P.S. Are you joining me for Spring into Organising?

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