Panic!—I couldn’t find my Lemon Curd recipe—which I got from Raymond, who got it from the back of a sugar box. What’s important about this recipe is that it’s incredibly simple, made in the microwave instead of a double boiler. I want to make some today with our abundant Meyer lemon crop.
I did finally find it filed under Sauces in my recipe box, printed out from an old e-mail (“old” as in “before the last computer crash”). This illustrates how badly I need to organize my precious recipe collection. I have a large card file—I use 5x8 cards so that I can tape clippings to them instead of copying; a computer file with many subfolders; a five-foot shelf of cookbooks; and a binder of typed recipes from twenty years ago. And a messy pile of magazine and clippings that are “current.”
How do you organize your recipes? I have a kind of system. If someone asks for a recipe I write my own version on the computer and save it there, and a couple of times a year I back the file up to a writeable CD. If a recipe from a magazine or newspaper clipping is a keeper, I tape it to an index card and file it in the card file. I have written little cookbooks for you and Russell and Grandma, but they’re from older computers and I don’t have copies. Besides, my cooking has evolved so much over the years that many ten-year-old recipe versions don’t reflect how I cook now.
But enough organizational talk! Here’s that Lemon Curd recipe for posterity:
Lemon Curd
½ cup butter
Microwave 45 to 60 seconds to melt.
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon peel
1/3 cup lemon juice
Whisk into melted butter.
1 egg
Add to butter mixture and whisk again.
Microwave 2 to 4 minutes longer, stirring twice during cooking, until sauce thickens slightly.
Also, you can find that Chicken Tagine recipe from Parade Magazine here:
http://www.parade.com/articles/editions/2006/edition_11-19-2006/Whats_Cookin
Dad made this, using the last few tiny eggplants from this year’s plants and two zucchinis, and leaving out the almonds. It was wonderful, and even better the next day.
Oh, my recipe system is terrible. I have a manila folder which, becaue it's 8 1/2 x 14", doesn't fit on any normal bookshelf, and is all bent up. Half the recipes in there are on scratch paper -- on the backs of rock show flyers, often -- and many are on postcards and notecards from you and Grandma. I try to keep all loose recipes there, but some are stuck in other cookbooks. And I try to annotate recipes in cookbooks with pencil ("good"; "add basil"), but I don't always remember to, especially if they're no good.
ReplyDeleteThe best recipe storage is Gmail, I've found. I have that lemon curd recipe, and several more you've sent me, and they're easier to search my email archive for than to find on paper!