So Many Recipes, So Little Time

I love food and I love to cook. Such is my lot in life. I’ve been on a recipe rampage lately. Everywhere I go on the web, I see lovely food porn videos and photographs, which feeds my addiction and leaves me wanting more. The irony is that since I’m trying to lose weight I can’t eat half of what I see. Maybe most of what I see.

Recently, I signed up with Yummly.com as an online place to store recipes I want to try. It seems to work pretty well, letting me create a link to recipe on any site. I also store recipe links on Evernote, but in general, I’m trying to migrate everything over to Yummly.

And cookbooks! I’ve bought so many e-cookbooks over the last year that I can’t even remember what I have. That’s one of the drawbacks to e-readers – I have an ancient Kindle and the books all get lost in the list, and there’s no good way to search unless I remember the title or author. That’s doesn’t happen. I did find that the latest version of Kindle for PC will let me create collections so I’ve put all my cookbooks into one folder. That helps.

But here’s the thing. Between all my various programs, and all the websites I frequent, (not to mention the hard copies of cookbooks that I have, along with my file of recipes from my personal chef days), I have access to probably 10,000 recipes. That’s before I go to Google and type in something I’m looking for.

This is ridiculous. There’s no way anyone needs 10,000 recipes. Plus, let me be honest. There’s often a lot of similarity in recipes. There are only so many variations for eggplant parmesan for instance, and most of those variations make very little difference in the final dish. I keep thinking that I should just settle on ten or twenty recipes that I like and cook those. I’m wasting half my life looking through recipes!

Except for the enjoyment I get from it, and the fun I have when I indulge my sense of adventure in the kitchen. Is that a waste?

I don’t know. I do know my addiction is no danger of being conquered. At best, maybe I’ll slow down a bit. I do have a few recipes I make more than once. For instance, yesterday I made this awesome Brussels sprouts salad, and today I’m making this more-than-hummus dish, which I may pair with the salad in a whole-wheat hamburger bun. Both of these are favorites.

I guess I’ll continue to be a food junkie. I’ll continue eating healthful food in small portions and keep trying to (mostly) resist the sweet stuff.

What about all of you? I know some of you have cooking blogs of your own and some of you hate to even enter the kitchen. You all have to eat. What’s your go-to style and favorite foods?