I shared a photo of this notebook on Instagram recently and a lot of people seemed to love it. I realized it’s quite unusual for me to show off a notebook that is this beat-up and battered!

Most of my notebooks are pocket size journals and sketchbooks. I tend to go through them fairly fast, and I’m not that hard on them. They get broken-in but they stay in pretty good shape. I’ve had a few notebooks where the spine tore apart– my first Moleskine softcover, and a Markings/CR Gibson notebook come to mind (photo in this post). But nothing has gotten as abused as this Picadilly notebook that I’ve been using for cooking notes!

The elastic lost its tension when it was relatively new. It didn’t take that long for the spine to break either– I think a better-quality notebook would have survived longer.

For many years, I’ve tended to tear recipes out of magazines and newspapers, and many of those are stuffed into an A4 size Moleskine Folio Portfolio— the jumbo size version of the Memo Pockets.

But at some point I started looking at more recipes online, and began copying my favorites into the Picadilly notebook. I bought it at a Borders store, almost 15 years ago. If I remember correctly, it was the first Picadilly notebook I purchased– I’d been wanting to try one, but I couldn’t find any pocket-sized ones at first. This larger size is unusual for me but it’s very practical for cooking notes, since it opens flat and stays that way.

For a few pages, I used it for random drawings and doodles. But I decided pretty quickly to devote it to jotting down recipes. It’s lived in a kitchen cabinet for years now, with more and more recipes being written and pasted and tucked into it.

I’ve gotten very behind on stapling or taping all the loose recipes into the pages, so the loose sheets have gotten rather crumpled, in addition to many of them being stained with splashes of whatever I was cooking. It’s only in the last few years that the notebook got so over-stuffed that the front cover started tearing off and had to be reinforced with duct tape.

My partner has suggested several times that I start a new notebook or some neater way to capture these recipes, but I’m kind of attached to this messy notebook. I’ve jotted so many notes about tweaks to ingredients and cooking times, and I like seeing all my sloppy scribbles. The only problem is that my partner can’t read them! Her handwriting is much prettier, and consistently neat, as you can see below.

We also have a couple of looseleaf notebooks filled with printed-out recipes, and saved recipe cards from when we subscribed to Blue Apron several years ago.

At some point I suppose it will make sense to consolidate everything, but even if I re-write all my favorite recipe notes, I think I’ll have to save this notebook. To me, it represents an aspect of self-improvement: for years, cooking was something I avoided because I just didn’t know what I was doing, and I felt very stressed about it. But as I learned more, and felt more comfortable not just feeding myself but cooking for others, the dishes that I mastered became a source of pride for me. Learning to cook is an accomplishment I feel good about, and I’ll always look fondly at how this notebook traces my progress.