Help! My Magazines Have Fallen and I Can’t Get Up!

Hey Rachel

There are many reasons to invite friends over for dinner. Obviously pouring over my many cookbooks and magazines to find interesting recipes to make is one. So, too, is the anticipation of good conversation and wine. But the other obvious reason to invite people over for dinner regularly is so I can rediscover my dining room table.

As the editor of a home and lifestyle magazine (shameless plug for you to check it out on Facebook at life@home magazine or online at http://www.timesunion.com/lifeathome), I know all about clutter and feng shui and how all our useless stuff gets in the way of our clear thoughts and emotions etc. I have written articles on it for God’s sake.

But then the reality of my life hits, and I put things aside to read later and suddenly what began as a small pile of paper takes on a life of its own. This little foible is particularly problematic when it comes to magazines. I am a magazine addict and in particular magazines that feature recipes. I regularly turn down pages of recipes I want to try, and then place the magazine on the dining room table — where I promptly forget about it for the most part until it looks like this.

And this is just the magazines with recipes. The table also included my many (very organized in my head, thank you) piles of research for this book I was working on. Needless to say, we hadn’t eaten there in a while.

Enter the dinner party. I was sick of looking at the mess and wanted to celebrate the fall and create a nice tablescape for the table, so I invited friends over and started tossing. I was conflicted about what to do with the recipes and decided to rip the pages out of the magazines. So now I have a nice (much thinner) pile of magazine pages. It’s not the best organized concept, but at least it’s a step. And the dinner party was a blast.

Does anybody have any suggestions for how to handle this magazine recipe addiction? How do you all organize your recipes? I could seriously use the help!