Cooking and Crafting

Given that we’re deep in the Grey Season here in P-town, I’ve been indulging in the annual Cooking Of The Sturdy Winter Foods. Something about feeling cold most of the time just makes me crave stews and casseroles and soups.

I have a lot of great cookbooks, thanks to my Mom, but I so often take the lazy way out, and when I want to make, say, Pastitsio, I’ll just type that into Google rather than page through all my books.

. . . Which means I have a growing pile of recipes I’ve printed, and clipped out of various magazines. I’ve been thinking about ways to use these — not only to organize them, but to craft with them.

So first, a bunch of links:

- An awesome post about creating your own cookbooks,, at 101 Cookbooks. Great ideas for using Flickr and del.icio.us.

- A little tutorial for creating your own photo recipe cards, from Canadian Living.

- I like this idea for transforming a metal lunch box into a recipe holder.

- If you never have, I highly recommend checking out the fine selection of food zines, aka cookzines, over at Whammy! Industries. Real people, real stories, real recipes. This is one of my favorites.

I’m also toying with these ideas at the moment:

- Since I just got the awesome Comic Life on my computer, I’d love to make a comic book about creating a single recipe. You know, a combo of Adventures In The Kitchen, and step-by step instructions. (I’m such a geek.)

- If you have friends over for dinner this winter, how about taking lots of pictures during the meal, and then collaging them onto a recipe card, along with the recipe for the main dish? Then you can send this to everyone who came as a thank-you.

- It would also be fun to collect a series of recipes that make wildly different use of the same ingredients, and compile them into a zine or stack of recipe cards. Great gift — a bunch of assorted cheese recipes for someone who loves cheese.

- I’m also taking photos these days of my finished dishes, and am planning to make a set of blank cards using a good recipe and my photo. A greeting card with built-in usefulness!

. . . Oh- and this weekend, I’m planning to make a pot of killer chili. What’s your favorite recipe for that?