Organizing Cookbooks and Thinking About Food

This weekend I worked on organizing some of our bookshelves. They are near the kitchen, so we like to keep our cookbooks on the top shelves and we keep our cds on the lower shelf. Unfortunately, they had collected a whole bunch of other random items as well. This is a before picture:

　

　

I had been wanting to clean off and organize these shelves for a long time, but had been intimidated by the multitude of things I had no idea what to do with. There were boxes that our cell phones came in, old toys that we had put up high so our daughter (now 6!) wouldn’t choke on them, some in-progress art projects, and about a million pieces of paper, mostly recipes I had printed out or ripped out of magazines. There were single screws that I had no clue where they came from, picture frames, broken knick-knacks we hadn’t had the heart to throw away, and, oh yeah, cookbooks and cds, among other things. I have stared at those shelves for years, trying to get up the courage to clean them off, but all the random homeless items kept me from wanting to tackle them.

Finally it hit me-- why do I have to find permanent homes for things right now? Why can’t I just clean off this space and find a temporary home for this stuff, and I can put it away later when things are more organized? What I ended up doing was getting a big box with a lid and filled it with all the random things that didn’t have homes. My big box ended up getting pretty full, but I’m not going to worry about that right now. I ended up with nice, clean (after I dusted, anyway!) shelves with neatly organized cookbooks. I’m not finished organizing the cds yet, but here is a mostly after picture:

　

　

I did find a few cookbooks to give to Goodwill, then I put all the paper recipes in a pile and sorted through them all. I found an old binder and some clear plastic sleeves to put the good ones in. Much better!

While I was sorting through the cookbooks I found my old binder that had my printed food lists from when I used to do the Weight Watchers Core plan. I have been dissatisfied with my weight ever since our 2-year-old was born and I decided to start it up again. I’m so thankful I printed out everything so I don’t have to pay the membership fees to get the information! I’m so tired of being overweight, but I’m really picky when it comes to vegetables so it’s always been hard for me to lose weight because I just don’t enjoy eating healthy. A year or two ago, though, I was talking with a friend who is very adventurous when it comes to eating, and she told me I probably don’t like vegetables because I haven’t found the “right” way to prepare them. I had never thought about it before, but she was absolutely right! I normally hate broccoli, but I could eat mountains of the stuff when it’s cooked with an Asian sauce, like soy sauce or teriyaki. And I really don’t like asparagus most of the time but I’ve had it with a roasted red pepper sauce that made it super scrumptious. I realized if I just sat down and thought about the kinds of foods I like I could probably learn to make vegetables in ways that I really enjoy them. So along with going back to the Core plan and limiting my diet to fat free dairy, lean meats, and whole grains, I’m going to try to learn ways to prepare vegetables and fruits (because they really kind of bore me most of the time) in ways that will wow me so I will want to eat lots of them!

Okay, enough of the healthy talk. Let’s talk about cake. It was our daughter’s birthday this week and she told me she wanted a Chipettes cake. Here’s what I came up with-- she loved it! This was only my second attempt at decorating a cake, so don’t laugh. Since creating the Chipettes out of frosting was totally out of my league I printed pictures of them onto cardstock and cut them out, taped them to straws, and stuck them on the “stage” I made with the frosting and some sprinkles. Maybe when she gets older she will be pickier about my cake decorating techniques, but for now she’s a happy customer.