alenxa_classic | ooooh, that looks good

I blame my mother-in-law.

The near end of the kitchen/dining table is inaccessible at the moment, blocked off by a stack of chintz chair cushions and a pile of L.A. Times Food sections. Somewhere in the pile are hundreds of cool recipes I never made time to cut out and organize. For a while I was very good about clipping them, even pressing them in a binder to get the creases out. Then I got lazy and started folding the whole thing up and shoving it in the top portion of our Ikea microwave cart, to be perused later.

I didn't realize how long this had been going on until I started trying to make room in the cabinet beneath my stash for three new cookbooks from K's mom, which I had received for various holidays and occasions and recently unearthed in a round of "WTF-is-this-oh-my-GOD" spot-cleaning. The cookbooks in the cabinet range from cake-pan-sized to slightly smaller than an index card, and I regularly have to dig the little ones out from behind the big ones. What's more, the shorties take up as much space on the cabinet floor as the monsters, which has relegated my heavy-rotation binder-style books to the space atop the phone book stack for the better part of a year. This was unacceptable. So I pulled out all my supermarket-checkout books and everything smaller, and stacked it up. In the process, I found a small stack of rumpled clipped goodies, several equally rumpled Food sections, and a mini-binder with the selection of recipes I'd not only clipped, but pressed.

Where to put the small books? In the open space above the cabinet, of course. "Open" here meaning "stuffed with Food sections." I removed a stack........another stack......and they just kept coming. All the way back to 2002. I don't think it's a coincidence that my tenure at my current employer started about that time.

So the shelf under the micro is now populated by a collection of mini-cookbooks, and my kitchen scissors are chewing through half a year of recipes a night. 2002, I've been realizing, was really a golden year for the Times Food staff; they averaged upwards of 10 recipes per week, most of them sounding yummy. They were also very good about not printing recipes on the backs of other recipes, so you could actually, you know, cut them all out if you wanted. And they had as many cool articles on food as you could want, and the requisite ads, all in fewer pages than the current section and with less blather. I found articles I remembered reading about artisanal goat cheese, wine vinegar, and tequila; and things I didn't remember but pored over: beets, asparagus, vegan haute cuisine, edible frontyard landscaping. (I'd like to see an OC housing association OK that. Seriously.) By comparison, the 2005-2006 sections are lucky to squeeze in five or six recipes, most of which I generally don't want for one reason or another. It's like the year their restaurant reviewers got on sequential kicks for ultra-spicy food and pork pumps: just not my thing. (Their reviewer now just seems to use her column as a place to snark.)

The problem I've discovered is that my habit of shoving the papers into their little niche included a fold along the standard newspaper fold, plus an extra fold in half. So about 2/3 of the recipes I've clipped have curls, waves, or outright creases that make it near impossible to tile them on a page for mounting. I've been layering them like lasagna in my huge acrylic platter-tray (bet

sekl didn't think I'd get this particular use out of it) and topping the mess with a phone book. Those that don't need flattening have been getting sorted, re-sorted, and cursed at as I try to arrange them on fluorescent bond paper (left over from plastering Ring Road with Litguild fliers) and glue-stick them down. I was using notebook paper with tape, but realized the holes wouldn't hold and the paper was likely to age differently under the tape. It could be worse; my earliest attempts at recipe-tiling used poster-style rings of masking tape. Granted, they've held, but they're looking pretty bumpy.

It feels oddly satisfying to have a plan for getting a handle on one corner of the clutter in my life. If I live through this, maybe attacking the rest of my junk won't be so bad.