The recipes from newspapers/magazines throwdown

[snowangel]

Over here, Chris proposed a throw-down based on the number of cookbooks you own and actually cook from. What about those recipes you clip or post-it from magazines and newspapers?

I'm pathetic. Any time one of kids is sick on the couch during a weekday, I intend to pull out my recipe box and/or magazines and go through them. I just did.

Whatever possessed me to clip some of these?

My recipe box has been full of recipes (had the sick kid at home yesterday), and me oh my, the recycling bin was full of all sorts of "what were you thinking?" clippings.

On to the magazines.

[suzilightning]

susan,

years ago i adapted the recipe for Ruby Chicken from one i read in a newspaper and still used it.

chicken breasts, fresh oj, cranberries, some brown sugar, spices. bake. serve.

[Chris Amirault]

What a great topic. I have, exactly, none. Not sure what to make of that.....

[maggiethecat]

I have a binder with plastic sleeves in which I've stored the clippings and printouts of the last four years, many of them from Receipe Gullet (Nero W.'s One of Each Soup and Jaymes's Caramel Corn are classics.) I can understand why I clipped or printed them, but I admit that I use maybe 5% of the recipes.

Edited to add: A keeper is a lemon bar recipe from an early "Martha Stewart Living."

Edited October 16, 2009 by maggiethecat (log)

[Pierogi]

Oh God.....

You've hit my secret compulsion. May as well get the confession over with.

Hello. My name is Roberta and I am an obsessive recipe clipper. I believe it must be hereditary. My Mom was addicted to clipping recipes from magazines and newspapers too.

I remember ragging on her unmercifully when I was a snot-nosed 20-something about the massive quantities of recipe clippings she had. I believe my rant was something along the lines of “you know, Momma, if YOU made a new recipe every day from your files, and *I* made a new recipe every day from your files, we’d never get through them all by the time I die !”

And now, I have become my mother.

And yet. I keep clipping. I would say I actually use 0.0005% of the ones I clip, and maybe repeat 0.005% of those.

I am hopelessly addicted. Admitting it is the first step, isn’t it ?

[Chris Amirault]

I'd be really interested to know whether people clip and/or use newspaper and magazine recipes at the same rate. Do you lean one way or another? And has that changed as newspaper food sections have dwindled away over the years?

[Safran]

I, too, am a "clipper"...some I post on the fridge with a magnet...they sometimes yellow and curl and then go to the recycle bin, but many others I do try out. Because most of them are seasonal, the ingredients are often on hand and that's what makes me try a recipe.

[Kerry Beal]

When my mother demented my sister in law and I had the job of going through all the stuff - we had a great time. There were files and envelopes full of clippings. Must have been a dozen recipes for tortiere.

I culled the ones I wanted - don't think I would ever have thrown the rest out - cause you never know when you might need one. Not sure where they are right now though.

I haven't clipped anything in the last few years, but I do have probably a couple of dozen clipped recipes that are part of my repertoire. Notably Peter Gzowski's beef stew recipe (I actually tore it out of a magazine in a waiting room because there was no photocopier available - there I've confessed!) and a bunch of interesting rhubarb recipes from the paper.

Up until a few years back we had a lovely lady named Norma Bidwell as the foodie in the local paper - a lot of the clipping were via her columns.

[mgaretz]

I have never found a recipe that I wanted to clip or save, the exception being Cook's Illustrated/Cook's Country magazines - which I keep the whole issue of. I have received free subscriptions to Gourmet and Bon Appetit, was a long-time subscriber to Sunset, and purchased numerous other cooking magazines in airports to read on the plane, but nothing has ever inspired me enough to save it. I did once modify a recipe from Sunset, but what I ended up with wasn't very similar.

[johnnyd]

I am a serial clipper. I have several pounds of NYT dining sections and Sunday magazine recipe pages dating back at least ten years. I have (and regularly use) almost every issue of Savuer. Whenever I'm bored or pick up an unusual ingredient, I poke through the collection.

I recently found Salsify Root at our farmer's market and remembered a recipe for chicken with salsify from Savuer #106.

I use clipped recipes about 60% of the time. Problem is organizing them into some coherent data base.

[Brasco66]

Not a "clipper"....but I have a funny (strange) story to share about clippings. When I was the Head Chef of an Italian restaurant back in the 90's....I had a sales person from one of the gourmet vendors I used.....he was a strange, awkward little man....walk into the kitchen, with out being announced and hand me a fistfull of clippings (mostly from Women's Day, etc). He turned on his heals and left without a word. When I began to peruse the clippings I noticed that he had highlighted the cheese's used in the recipes and had wriiten in the margin "we sell this". Creative sales technique, perahps...I'll let you be the judge, but as a cocky young chef at the time, I was deeply offended and never bought from his company again. 15 years later, it just makes me laugh.

Edited October 16, 2009 by Brasco66 (log)

[Special K]

I have tons of clippings. When I have a block of free time (or am procrastinating . . . ) I go through the stacks of cooking machines and NYT dining sections and clip away - I take anything that looks interesting. I take even things I know I'll probably never try - I think it's because I have a fairly large filing cabinet (the library card-catalog case I mentioned yesterday), and, you know, Nature abhors a vacuum. Oh, and I am a pack-rat. This is why we do not live on a houseboat - my stuff would sink it.

I think I use clippings and cookbooks about equally.

I use the clippings in the same way I use cookbook recipes - I look at three or four (or five, or six . . . ) recipes for one dish until I have a very good idea of what's supposed to happen, and then I work on "my own" recipe until it's just where I like it, and that goes on the "final" index card.

Then the idea is that I go back and toss the clippings, but I never seem to do that. You just never know.

I also have a nice little collection of bloopers: mistitled things, mostly. It's funny when a recipe for brownies is labeled "Salmon." Those are posted on the refrigerator.

[Toliver]

I'm not a consistent clipper. It has helped keep my food magazine collection at bay by forcing me to go through and, instead of keeping the entire issue, clip out recipes that sounded good to me and toss the rest of the magazine. This eventually led to the stopping my subscription to Bon Appetit as I found less and less recipes that interested me enough to cip them out.

My mom, on the other hand, has a little wooden recipe box overstuffed with decades of clippings. A very small percentage of those clippings have actually been made by her. But what she did make have been winners and are still made to this day. A summertime favorite was a beef jerky recipe she clipped out of the newspaper decades ago. And Thanksgiving isn't the same without her recipes clipped from Women's Day magazine for Onion Casserole, Strawberry-Cranberry Jello Salad and a wonderful Cajun Turkey Gravy that my brother always makes.

[heidih]

During my recent move I threw out an entire storage box of newspaper clippings along with a few magazine ones. I never cooked from them, but I did use them as inspiration, much like I do most of my cookbooks. They were mostly from the Los Angeles Times food section when it was in its glory days. I would have kept them if I had the space.

[Pierogi]

I'd be really interested to know whether people clip and/or use newspaper and magazine recipes at the same rate. Do you lean one way or another? And has that changed as newspaper food sections have dwindled away over the years?

Good question ! I've always skewed towards magazines, simply because I took/take so many more of them than newspapers. And even in the glory days of newspaper food sections, at best they were maybe 10-20 pages long, as opposed to magazines.

Having said that, in the glory days of newspaper food sections, I usually found at least one per week that I clipped. Now, it's more like one every 2-3 months, if that. Food sections are a sorry imitation of what they once were, that's for sure.

[Kerry Beal]

Perhaps a throwdown on what percentage of recipes you bookmark online would be the next logical challenge. Given the way I 'clip' online recipes - ie bookmark everything that has potential, then weed for what I'm after, and the fact that I never go back and purge the ones I didn't use - I'll bet the percentage is going to be pretty low there.

[Darienne]

I don't clip much, but a recipe in our local newspaper changed my life. And I do make it often, but with my own tweaks such as added raspberries and booze.

"Chocolate-covered Banana Mousse Freeze" and the chocolate cover was a ganache. Ganache? That's a strange word, said I and I looked it up online. And nothing was ever the same again. End of story.

[suzilightning]

i don't clip - i copy onto recipe cards then am able to pass the intact mag along as a laginappe when i send out a load of cookbooks. i am about to go to my third athletic shoe box for my recipe cards. i've already told johnnybird that if i die before he does he has to offer the recipe boxes on the FREE COOKBOOK thread and send one box to each of the first three people who reply and the fourth gets all the leftover mags. hope you like 'em.

[nibor]

I clip. I leave the clipping on the counter next to the grocery list. If I don't buy what I need and try the recipe the next time I go to the store, I throw the clipping out. Use it or lose it.

[Pierogi]

Perhaps a throwdown on what percentage of recipes you bookmark online would be the next logical challenge. Given the way I 'clip' online recipes - ie bookmark everything that has potential, then weed for what I'm after, and the fact that I never go back and purge the ones I didn't use - I'll bet the percentage is going to be pretty low there.

Also a good question.

For me, the percentage "used" of these would be MUCH higher, approaching 100%, while the raw numbers of recipes "clipped" would be miniscule. I only go in search of recipes off the web when I want something I don't think I have in the mounds of clippings, or in one of my cookbooks. So it's a directed effort. When I find something interesting, I print it, and go on about my business. I typically don't spend any time cruising through food websites like Epicurious or Recipezaar or whatever, just to see what there is to see. As I said in another thread, I'm a hard copy person. To browse, I like paper in my hands, not electrons on a screen,.

[Sugar Apple]

I have several file folders and loose leaf binders full of clippings but you could probably count on one hand the number of times I've used any of the recipes. I should probably throw them out but you never know...