Loose Leaf Piling System

I’ve just spent a few minutes sorting through a small clutch of recipes I keep in my filed in my loose leaf piling system. You will all be familiar with this system I’m sure. I am also sure that you would never stoop so low in kitchen carelessness as to actually use this system.

However it works well enough for me and there the recipes sit; ready and waiting to offer advice about what to shop for next and how to put everything together once the shopping is done. They are a motley collection of scraps cut out of papers and magazines, written out by hand while waiting in the doctor’s surgery and happily copied from books borrowed from the library.

They are the good old standbys, not the sort of recipe you might find on MasterChef, but reliable and easy to put together. As I looked through them I could see there might be any obstacles ahead.

One of my favourites is a recipe for curried sausages. Sausages. There’s a minefield; how would you know the ingredients in a sausage and where they might come from?  And curry!!  There's more chance of finding a hen with teeth.  All too hard I decide. Even banana cake is not without its problems. And what about spaghetti bolognaise? I’m not sure it is easy to find tomato paste made from Australian tomatoes.

The more I look the more discouraged I become. I can see that I will have to arm myself with the magnifying glass and the recipe ingredients, grit my teeth and trudge around the supermarket shelves and see what I can dig up.