Following up on the plans I wrote about in my last post, And now the real work begins, we have taken the first carload to Good Will, and sold the first few items on kijijii.
The most time-consuming project, though, was eliminating all of our printed recipes and cookbooks. I had discarded lesser-used cookbooks and past issues of Canadian Living magazines with each move, but we still had a shelf full of cookbooks, an index card box with old family recipes, and an over-stuffed expanding file pouch filled with newspaper and magazine clippings of past successes and future culinary delights.
I worked my way through every book, the index card box, and the expanding folder, and identified recipes to scan or photograph. My guidelines were fairly strict—only recipes we had made repeatedly and loved, including old family favourites, were marked to keep. Our penchant for cooking new things really helped to keep the stack of paper to be scanned to a minimum. Even my sheath of bread-baking recipes and notes was reduced to only a few choice pages.
A couple of considerations made this process much easier:
- Much of the time I use the internet for recipes anyway, so except for specific tried-and-loved recipes that would be difficult to locate/replicate I could Google pretty much anything I could imagine and find out how to make it.
- Since I was eliminating my entire kitchen setup, I wouldn’t have any baking pans or special dishes to bake or cook with anyway.
At the end of this project, we are now 100% paper free in the cookbook department. My digital recipe collection has increased by 117 items and is now in the cloud, all labelled and easy to find from any kitchen, anywhere.
¡Buen provecho!
Life: Phase Next 
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