Creative Input - tackling a overgrown cookbook

Take a little time to do something creative everyday - your day is that much fuller.

Sometimes it makes my home a better place.

Sometimes it just puts me inn a better place

I am the mother of four beautiful children but I found if I did something creative for me, them, my husband, I felt the day (me!) was a little more complete.  Something that didn't get eaten up, used up, messed up.

I love to sew, paint, needle art, but I also think cooking is a creative out put.  One dinner time when the children were young, I looked at our "if it's Monday, it must be meatloaf" kind of dinner right out of the 1950's - and I said out loud "I can't do this anymore" - so boring. 

I decided to cook something different every night!  I got a subscription to Cooking Light magazine, copied recipes off of TV shows like "Mad Hungry" with Lucinda Scala Quinn, guests on the "Nate Berkus Show" and Martha Stewart

 I bought a note book binder, page protectors, and a three hole punch and started keeping what we gave a thumbs up to after dinner and toss the not so great for us recipes. .Now, I was on the start of the culinary wave that has swept the country.  When I started this "there has to something better than a tater tot" quest there wasn't a food network on TV, magazines were the way to find a new recipe.  I love going into the grocery store with what little energy I had left and buy and issue of Everyday Food match a recipe to the store sale flyer - boom!  Dinner was in the bag!  But soon Rachael Ray would have her ground breaking show with celebrity quests and a recipe for dinner. 

Now we have The Chew there would be the new word

"foodie" which didn't mean you ate too much!  Pretty soon, my kids got older - which meant they/we got busier!  Soccer, ice skating lessons, school plays, baseball games that run for two hours, carpools and the high school football team - we all do it!

 I needed to create menus 

on the weekend and get myself a bunch of casserole recipes and a crock pot fast!  But then it got worse,  I went back to work!

I love my job as a nursery school teacher, I love my happy healthy family but the result came down to this:

I've got recipes jammed in there that not only haven't been tried yet, but loose ones, even a whole Cooking Light issue stuffed in there!  What a mess, it keeps popping open so it's not in order anymore!  The first question that needs to be answered when I look at this cookbook cover is "What was I thinking?!" It was probably just as ugly when it was new!

Time has marched on, my children are older and college bound

so it's time to cook through this book, the Food Network and Sarah Carey's Everyday Food e-mails and the printed off recipes from cooking shows.  With only four of us home right now, I am going to give each recipe a four star rating to see if it will make it into my new binder - which I haven't purchased yet!  But when I do, I am going to buy one that has a plastic cover pocket and today I am going to paint a 'still life with lemons' or something like that - my creative input for the day!

Pam