recipe collection

recipes have always been my things. they always make me smile. i read through them and imagine the smells that would be coming from my kitchen as i go through the steps, and of course i dream of what the finished dish might taste like.

for many many years now, i've been reading different cooking blogs. mostly the ones that focus on sugary treats. oddly enough, though i would page through my cookbooks at random, i was never into collecting books. but recipes from blog sites? totally different story.

maybe it's due to the fact that my digital recipe collection takes up no physical space. so there's no guilt about using up what precious little cabinet space i have now. also, cookbooks cost money, but copy-pasting text from various sites is free! and because i'm not using other peoples' amazing creations for profit or gain, i don't feel bad about collecting them for later.

well, i don't feel bad about using other peoples' recipes because i don't call them my own. but i did start to feel bad about the amount i have amassed. so many wonderful ideas for the kitchen, and so few i actually made. and yet i would continue to read blogs and click links and save files for later use.

finally, i realized it started bordering on the ridiculous. over 400 recipes taking up just over 8mb of space on my hard drive, i think i needed to slow down. and so i have. or at least i'm trying to.

now, though i still look every day, i've been more careful about what i save. there are so many recipes that look amazing to me, but i know i'd never make them. sometimes it's because my family would never eat it. sometimes it's because the ingredients are expensive or hard to find around here. or sometimes it's because the recipe is long and complicated. not to brag, but there aren't too many recipes that are above my skill set, it's just i don't have hours during the day to devote to making a particular dish.

unless it's a cake. i've spread super complicated cake recipes out over days, because i don't have the six hours it would have taken to make it all in one shot. but then, in my mind, some cake is just worth it.