Nov. 15, 2006 - 3 Reasons to Get Rid of Your Cookbooks

Are you familiar with Fly Lady?   I love her ideas for "hot spots" - you know, those spots that are a magnet for clutter!  Come to think of it, my whole house is a hot spot!  Anyway, my self-assigned hot spot today is my cookbook shelf.  It's the cupboard above my stove's range hood.  I have 24 cookbooks!  (At least that's how many I was able to count - it's such a mess)  In addition to those 24 or so cookbooks, I own about 24 more of those little recipe books that you buy at the grocery store checkout.  I am such a sucker for those!  I love that they're small (they need to be to fit into my cupboard) and that most of the recipes have a picture (a must if I am going to even think of trying the recipe).

Well, most of those cookbooks never get opened.  All they do is take up space (which I don't have enough of) and make me annoyed every time I open the cupboard and 2 or 3 fall on my head!  I own a recipe box that is loaded with all my handwritten recipes that I've collected over time.  Most of which I never use.  I always seem to turn to the tried and true favorites week after week.  Probably no more than 12-15 main entree recipes.  So....if all I need are those 15 index cards, why am I using an entire cupboard?  I could so use that cupboard to shove in a bunch of clutter from some other area of my house!

I think that today I will donate those cookbooks to charity.  I don't know why, but it will be very hard to part with those books!  I just might want to browse through one of those books someday.  The only thing that is helping me to part with them are 3 reasons that I would like to share...

1) I rarely or never open them anyway.

2) There are millions of recipes available at my fingertips on the internet.   My favorites are allrecipes and foodnetwork.

3) Every single friend, neighbor and relative has a cookbook shelf I could browse through if I really needed to look at a book!

Today, I am going to be gaining a whole cupboard to hide some other clutter in!

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