The Great Recipe Purge!

It had to be done.  It was just getting out of control.  I speak, of course, of my list of recipes "to try".  There are several websites I collect recipes through: Taste of Home, Whole Foods, Cooking Channel, Food Network, and Pinterest (of course).  Between all of them, I had...well, even a lot more than I do now.  I cleared out Taste of Home a while back and pinned all of those to a board on Pinterest.  Last weekend, I went through all of my saved recipes for Food Network, Whole Foods, and Cooking Channel.  I got rid of well over 100 recipes, people!  Oh, and I don't even know how many I binned from my recipe software, too.  Don't act like you're not impressed.

So what was my criteria?  When you have that many to choose from, how do you know what to keep? Well, here's what I did.

Roast Chicken: Gone.  I have one really great, simple roast chicken recipe.  It's all I really need.  You don't need to fancy it up or have endless variations unless you make it all the time, which I don't.  In fact, I very rarely make roast chicken anymore--I know, there was a time I was doing it every week--because I don't do that particular CSA any longer, so I don't get whole chickens any more.

Pasta: Gone.  I'm sorry, I just can't have twenty new pasta recipes to try when we just don't eat it that much anymore.  Since Celiac came into our lives and we had to go GF, we've eaten pasta less than ten times.  Would I have kept them if we weren't a GF household?  Heck yes!  I LOVE pasta, but the GF stuff just isn't the same, and it's just not worth it.

Ditto to anything else particularly gluten-y (i.e. bread).  Let's face it, I'm not a baker.

Anything else that I wasn't particularly wild about: Gone.  This is serious business.  I can't hold spots for C-string players...I just made a sports metaphor.  I need someone to tell me if I used it appropriately.

So where does that leave me?  Around 300 recipes stil to try.  And that's a vast improvement!  Hey, at least it's not more right?  How do you decide which recipes to try and which to ignore?