Posts Tagged ‘cooking’

Use an address book to store your recipes

Posted April 19, 2012 by
in Pens, Paper & People, Planning Tips | Add your comment »

Here’s an intriguing idea from bartender Jeffrey Morgenthaler, which I got to via The Kitchn: use an address book to store your most-referenced recipes.

It’s the most important tool I own, and I never set foot behind a bar without my book. The alphabetical tabs make it quick and easy to look up a recipe, and inside I’ve got years worth of classic cocktails, house recipes, syrup and mixer recipes for prep or to share with guests, variations, and layer upon layer of correction fluid and margin notes. It’s absolutely indispensable to me.

Morgenthaler uses a Moleskine address book for this purpose, but you could easily use the insert that comes with your planner (assuming that, like many of us who are tethered to our cell phones and computers, you don’t already use it for addresses) and move it with you from year to year, as it grows. And of course, you could store more than cocktails — I know I’m always looking up the quantities for my favorite pancake recipe on the weekend, which I can never seem to remember…

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Do you keep a recipe box?

Posted December 21, 2011 by
in Editorial, Pens, Paper & People | 7 comments »

There was a great piece in Slate last week about recipe cards — “an accidental charter of [family] traditions, rendered in 3-by-5-inch index cards” — and how digital collections have since replaced them.

I’m certainly guilty of maintaining a digital recipe collection: blog posts that I’ve bookmarked, emailed recipes that I’ve filed away in a dedicated folder. But I also add my favorites to a binder I’ve owned since college, which has, like the index cards of yore, become “spattered with grease stains and marked with thumbprints.” It’s a haphazard bunch of dishes that I’ve printed from my computer, cut from the Sunday paper, or written out by hand, and it’s always fun to flip through and be reminded of something I added when I was living in Germany, say, or looking for new ways to cook the green beans from my garden.

Do you keep a recipe box?

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Macaron mania

Posted April 6, 2011 by
in Cabinet of Curiosities, Pens, Paper & People | 3 comments »

two macarons gone

When it comes to making sweets, I’m more of a jam-and-granola-bar gal, but I’ve heard so much about delicate, puffy French macarons that I’m thinking about breaking my stride. Murielle, my French counterpart, blogged about them in October. Cecilia, our product manager, told me about the number of new Laudree outlets she saw on her last trip to Paris. And suddenly I found myself recalling a grad school party where someone splurged on macaroons from the Silver Moon Bakery, which were tiny and delicious.

This being New York, of course, someone has to call the trend and make the rest of us feel self-conscious. No matter. Have you made macaroons? Were they worth it?

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Meal planning

Posted August 17, 2009 by
in Where to Go? | 5 comments »

dinner plate

Sarah of Ghost World is an impressively well-organized blogger and pediatrics resident (and Quo Vadis / Rhodia fan). Reading her recent posts about refilling an empty fridge and managing the loose ends in life reminded me of a subject I’ve been meaning to write about since I saw her advice on Carrots ‘n Cake back in April: meal planning.

When I lived in Europe (Germany, Austria, England) for a few years after college, I fell in love with how easy it was to go to the farmer’s market every day, see what inspired me, and cook. Of course, I also had a lot more free time—the easy pace of European life is often oversold, but it’s definitely less hectic than your average New York day. The only thing you had to plan ahead for was Sunday, when everything was closed. And you could always go to a restaurant if you didn’t do your shopping on Saturday.

Here in Red Hook, I’m no longer close to a daily farmer’s market, though we do have a great supermarket. I work from home, and I don’t have kids, so it’s still relatively easy for me to pop over to the store at the end of the day and pick ingredients for that night’s dinner. Nonetheless, I’ve been experimenting with the idea of plotting out a couple meals in advance—in part because it’s summer, and I can now buy a bunch of vegetables at once at our weekly farmer’s market, and in part because, you know, life is stressful, and who doesn’t want more free time to read or garden or take an aimless walk around the block before dinner?

There are plenty of online tools to keep track of recipes and meals; many people also use their planners for that purpose. Thus far, however, I’ve been taking it 2-3 days at a time and using a simple shopping list as a mnemonic device.

How far in advance do you plan your meals?

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Julie, Julia, and Clairefontaine

Posted July 30, 2009 by
in Pens, Paper & People, Where to Go? | 1 comment »

Another one of Clairefontaine’s famous fans: Julia Child, who used the notebooks for recipes and notes when she was living in Paris and studying at Le Cordon Bleu.

So we were honored when the producers of Julie & Julia, a new movie about her life (and the attempt, decades later, of blogger Julie Powell to make each of the 524 recipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking), got in touch with us. There’s been a lot of talk online about the film — guess that’s what happens when you make a movie about a blogger. At any rate, the film’s prop master was interested in finding period-appropriate notebooks for star Meryl Streep to use, so our archivists dug some up and sent them over.

Unfortunately, we don’t know which ones they actually used, but you can spot one briefly at minute 1:10 of the preview. Still, any excuse to see Meryl Streep, right? Who, incidentally, is herself a fan of Exaclair. She used G. Lalo Verge pads as props in The Devil Wears Prada, and will be using a Quo Vadis Minister (Habana cover) and Rhodia pads in an upcoming, as-yet-untitled romantic comedy.

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