One line from a book that has stuck with me for years is Peg Bracken's phrase, "the recipes we swear by instead of at." Do you have some of those? I remember her also writing something like "I just want to know one little thing you can do with a chop besides broil it."
Well, I don't broil chops too often (all right, never), but I do know that you can leave them in a slow cooker all day on top of some sauerkraut, and they'll come out all right.
I keep a couple of binders of favourite, medium-favourite, and sounds-good-let's-try-it recipes. But I've also started a notebook--a very low-tech, dollar-store notebook--with pages listed by main ingredients that I want to use up, food I have in the fridge or the cupboard, or things that happen to be on sale this week. The recipes and ideas I've written in--not full recipes, just page numbers or notes like "in the red binder under Soups"--are pretty basic ones, and/or things you could do without adding a lot of other ingredients or taking a whole lot of time. What's the most basic thing you could do with a sweet potato? Stick it in the oven until it's done. Or peel it and cook it in a potful of water, or a steamer. Sometimes we forget the obvious. What else could you do with a sweet potato? Sweet potato fries. Fritters. Sweet potato salad. What else? Mash it and use it as a substitute for pumpkin puree (or feed it to the baby, if you have a baby). And so on. Canned pineapple? Besides just eating it or mixing it with other fruit, you could freeze it and then run it through the food processor for sherbet. Celery? Celery sticks, celery in salad or chili or stew or soup or stir fry, or Kitchener Special, or something sweet and sour. Sometimes it's not more recipes you need, it's just a review of the possibilities.
Red peppers are on sale this week at the discount supermarket. Okay, they're not local, but they're unusually inexpensive and I'll probably buy some. What can I do with them? Eat them raw as snacks or in salad--that might be as far as I'd need to go. But I could also plan a fajita meal, because I do have some tortillas (bought on sale) in the freezer, and I know we have chicken--now you're talking, as Mr. Fixit would say. Or I could put them in chili, or a stir-fry. Or I could chop some and flash-freeze on a cookie sheet.
I have one or two pages each dedicated to cabbage, barley, pineapple, peanut butter, ground turkey, and so on. It's like a personal index of the stuff we eat, so that I don't have to reinvent the wheel every time Mr. Fixit brings home ground turkey (oh yeah, last time we had Turkey Sloppy Joes), and so that I don't have to fish through all our cookbooks for an appropriate recipe.
I know that Gayle at Grocery Cart Challenge uses this idea on a larger scale. If she has chicken, tomatoes, and green beans, she goes on a large recipe website and plugs in those ingredients to find an appropriate recipe. My version is more limited, but it works for me.
**You never watched The Prisoner? "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered."
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