Saturday, June 25, 2011

RECIPES ALL ON ONE PAGE, PLEASE!

One of my favorite hobbies is collecting recipes. I love to try new ways to put my favorite foods together, and I am a pretty good cook. I get my recipes from cookbooks and cooking magazines (especially those digest-sized ones you buy at the supermarket checkout line--love those!), newspapers, websites, and wherever else I can find them. I have been known to tear a recipe or ten out of a magazine in a doctor's waiting room (especially if they have several of the same magazine), and have gotten some of my favorite recipes that way.

The problem comes when magazines scatter a recipe across a couple of pages, especially when you have to turn to a completely different page (at the back) to find the rest of your recipe. I find that really annoying, mostly because I've made more mistakes in copying recipes or following them when I've had to flip back and forth. If I'm reading a recipe (whether I plan to clip it or not), I want to read it all in one chunk, without having to flip to another page to see how it will turn out. Cooking magazines keep a recipe in its entirety on one page, but many of the so-called "ladies' magazines" are guilty of splitting recipes up.

A recipe is not the same as an article about the latest trend in makeup, a short story, or any Kardashian's advice on relationships, the pitfalls or celebrity, or how to keep all that junk in the trunk. When I'm reading those, I'm perfectly willing to flip to the back of the magazine to finish reading. However, a recipe belongs on one page, ingredients and instructions united. The only exception to this is a photo of said recipe, which can appear on the next page. Anything else is just making life harder than it has to be for everyone involved, but particularly the person trying to follow the recipe.

Magazine editors, take note: Recipes on one page, please!

Sunday, June 05, 2011

CROWTHER HOUSE RULES

Hillary wrote these several years ago, and they've been posted on my freezer ever since. Bedtimes are optional now, but most other rules remain the same, especially the last one.

1. Hillary's weekday bedtime is 11 PM. Evan's weekday bedtime is 10 PM. On weekends, bedtime is midnight.

2. You will be quiet in this house when Dad is in bed.

3. You will do your chores.

4. You will go to church.

5. Spiders die in this house.