The Perfect Reason to Keep Good Notes

Everyone makes mistakes, even with things they are familiar with. Sometimes that means burning a dinner you can make with your eyes closed, backing up into the garage door or even forgetting where you left your keys. It is these things that make us so wonderfully human. That being said, being fallible and human isn’t easy. It can be frustrating and arduous.

One of my major failings in the blog kitchen is keeping track of my notes. I take great notes. I can always recreate what I did from my notes… so long as I can find them. How is it I can lose my notes so easily and rapidly? Inspiration always seems to strike me at the most inopportune moments so to deal with this, I have Post-It Note Pads all over the place! I have orange ones, pink ones, yellow ones, blue ones and even lime green ones!

These little flags of color get lost among their bright cousins, and until I decide to wade through them, they stand at attention, waiting for me to pick them up and put them to use again. Why am I telling you all of this? Well, a few weeks ago, I tested a recipe I created for a salve. The jar has squatted on my desk, its contents shrinking as I dip into it. I was commenting to Tina how much I was enjoying my little test batch. Of course she wanted to try too!

She loved it so much, she came back and said that she wanted the recipe. Uh oh. I was quite sure I had taped that little Post It into my ideas notebook but when I went looking, it was nowhere to be found. I was in a panic! What was I going to do? I scrambled my brains to try and remember the percentages and came up blank. I even tried to recreate it in the blog kitchen. While I came up with an excellent product, it wasn’t the same and not what Tina was looking for.

Fast forward to this week. I decided it was time to tackle the unruly fringe of Post It Notes my desk has been forced to wear for the last several weeks. As I taped formulas into my book, discarded random notes and doodles, I came across my missing recipe. I was so relieved. I thought it had been lost to the shredder, never to be recreated again!

I immediately taped it into my spiral bound note book. My notebook is like a recipe scrapbook. Once I tape in a recipe, I add the date (sometimes) and notes about what it was like, if I liked it and even little random things that day. My favorite random note talks about my dog sneezing and scaring himself. It makes me laugh every time! Poor guy. He will never live that down.

If I can, I will even add a picture of the product. While my memory tends to be pretty good, this college of notes makes sure that I don’t have to worry about remembering. I can always look it up! While this particular notebook only has twenty pages left, it has been my companion in the kitchen for over a year now. I will be sad when it no longer accompanies me to the kitchen but its dog-eared pages will have an excellent place on my bookshelf.

While this story has a happy ending, I was lucky. I will certainly be taking measures to prevent this from happening again. As I work to change my habits and practices, I would love to hear how you keep your thoughts, recipes and bits of inspiration in an organized fashion. If you have any stories of your own, please share!

Thanks and stick around for tomorrow I will share the original recipe that caused such heart ache and on Friday I will show my attempt at recreating the original. While both are delightful formulations, they are different. I can’t wait to show you!

Cheers!