Have you ever found yourself staring at shelves full of so many shampoo or deodorant choices that you just can't decide what to get, so you end up leaving with nothing? I have come to the conclusion that too many choices can be almost as bad as having no choices at all. That might explain my recent recipe purge.
I was going nuts the other day, trying to find my praline icing recipe for Austin's birthday. It happens to be John's favorite in the world, and when I couldn't find it here, I sent a message asking him to check there in Houston for me. His reply? "Sure hope you manage to find it, else I just might have to re-think this whole marriage thing." Good thing I finally did.
During my hunt, it occurred to me that I should probably do the same 100 item purge on my recipes that I did on my wardrobe some years back. When I first read Simplify Your Life, by Elaine St. James, I made up my mind to rid myself of every clothes-shopping mistake I had ever made. What I ended up with was 100 pieces (including shoes and purses) that all mix and match, all fit comfortably, and all make me feel beautiful when I wear them. I can't tell you what a difference it made in my life. In fact, if I hadn't done it, we never would have bought this house in Wimberley. I would have taken one look at this teeny tiny closet and said, "Forget it. We're wasting our time here." Instead, I found myself thinking, "Woohoo, time for another purge!"
Anyway, back to recipes. When I first discovered Food Network, I went kind of crazy. I'd go online and print off everything Giada cooked. Then I was buying all of her, Ina's and Jamie's cookbooks. Now I can't resist the latest copies of Gourmet and Bon Appetit, and am always tearing out pages to save. Things are getting way out of control. So, I did exactly what I'd done to my wardrobe - culling out all but my very favorites, which these days are the simple, basic, flexible recipes where fresh, local ingredients are the stars, and I can substitute whatever is in season. I imposed an 100-item limit on myself, and each time I am tempted to tear out a new recipe, I must be willing to pull out and toss another.
Writing about my closet purge somehow dug up a long-buried and all-but-forgotten memory. Do any of you recall a clothing line from back in the 80's, called Units? Or maybe you came across its later incarnation, Multiples. It started as young Sandra Garrett's design school project, blossomed into many small boutiques in high end malls, then faded after it was sold to J.C. Penney. But, while they lasted, they were my ideal wardrobe. It was a modular concept, with only 10 or 12 pieces in the entire line, all made of a comfy, carefree, cotton knit. If you had all these pieces, in a few mix & match colors, you could easily come up with 100 different combinations, which you would then accessorize to make them uniquely yours. I was a happy girl in the 80's.
The most surprising outcome of my various purges was the same, startling discovery that Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch wrote about in their appendix to Ferenc Mate's book A Reasonable Life, titled A Reasonable Garden: "Just as it's easier to write a sonnet than free verse, it's easier to cook well with seasonal limitations: they are a spur to creativity."
I'm reading an interesting book now called The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey Into Terroir, by Amy B. Trubek. In it, I came across something amazing: "Perhaps ironically, given the story of its origin, but certainly inevitably, in light of our global food system, the taste of place has become a transnational mode of discernment. Increasingly, the taste of place is an intervention into the vast array of placeless and faceless foods and beverages now available to people everywhere." In other words, this whole grassroots locavore movement has come about because we're all sick and tired to too damn many inferior choices!
P.S. Many thanks to inthe80s.com for the image of a Units jumpsuit.
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