Monday, January 18, 2010

101 in 1001

First off, a HUGE congratulations to Jess on her awesome marathon finish yesterday. Can't wait to read the race report!

Second, I realized I've made some progress on my 101 in 1001 list, but I haven't documented much of it.

I've taken (and loved and gone back for more) a hot yoga community class.

We built a snowman on our snow day.



When we were in Tennessee, we talked to a financial advisor who got us on the right track with our mutual fund and making regular contributions.

We've made and canned marinara sauce for Christmas gifts (and syrup!).

And yesterday I put together a recipe binder.

I subscribe to Cooking Light, and- up until yesterday at least- I had a cabinet full of magazines full of perfectly good recipes that I never looked at because they weren't the latest issue. Plus I have a lot of recipes that were either given to me or I printed that were just kind of hanging out. So I devised a strategy to deal with the magazine and paper clutter. I can't take complete credit for this because I saw a similar strategy on Simple Mom, but I did think of it on my own before I saw it there.

The process goes like this. Take your cooking magazine and tear out all the recipes you are interested in trying and put them in a box. Other printed recipes go in there, too.



Each week, when you do meal planning, rifle through the box for things that interest you. If you hate the recipe, pitch it. If you like it, put it in your recipe binder.



I used dividers to separate the pages into sections like breakfast, meat, poultry, seafood, etc. Each recipe goes on a plastic sleeve so you can remove it easily and it stays protected from splatters. Plus because it's BIG, you can save any size recipe, and you don't have to take that extra step of writing it on a little card.







This project has its roots in a Christmas gift when my brother put together a few "family" recipes for me to take to college. It gave me a smile when I saw it, and I didn't think there was any reason it should be left out of the second edition.





I'm trying a new recipe tonight so we'll see if it's recipe binder worthy.

On the running front, I did 6.5mi with some 1 minute speed bursts on the treadmill today. Otherwise I'm chillin' after a morning of errands. I got my teeth cleaned (hate) and my hair cut (love) and did some other random stuff to get ready to go back to work tomorrow.