The Cottage Smallholder


stumbling self sufficiency in a small space

Lost in a pile somewhere

Photo: Early daffodils

Photo: Early daffodils

Tonight I was going to share my latest triumph. A Seville orange and quince marmalade. A very special recipe that needs a bit of forethought. The local quinces are frozen in late autumn to join the fresh oranges in january/February. The result is a marmalade with an unbelievably fruity depth. Heaven. Over the past couple of months I’ve tweaked and played with it and wrote the final recipe on the back of an envelope.

And there’s the rub. Decorating the cottage and occasional entertaining means that piles of these recipe envelopes are removed from the kitchen table and placed in a spot in the sitting room that, at the time, I know that I will remember forever. But the exact latitude and longitude of the place is swept away in the onslaught of further decorating, lunch and supper parties. The sitting room becomes a desert with a few hopeful oases.

This evening we tackled these piles and found hundreds of recipes but not the one in question. Tomorrow I’m going to buy a dedicated recipe sketch book, then all recipes and development history will be in one place. All these envelopes and notes are slowly driving us nuts.

This weekend I was planning to make a final batch of our new marmalade recipe. I can remember the quince to Seville orange ratio. But when I try and visualise the other ingredients my mind is totally and utterly blank.


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18 Comments

  1. The only problem with sketchbooks etc is that you usually misplace them as well!

  2. What about lost birthday card syndrome? You spot the perfect card for friend or relative X. You buy it, because said birthday is coming up in a few weeks. On arriving home you carefully admire the card, so lovingly chosen, and put it in a “safe place”, the location of which you may or may not divulge to other members of the family. The day before the birthday you remember you bought a card, you remember there was a “safe place” involved but the card has vanished into a black hole. So you rush out to buy a totally average card, write it in the queue at the Post Office, and send it. 6 months later you find the lost card which has apparently been on a gap year and has just returned home! A new “safe place” is found and the cycle repeats ad nauseum.

  3. kate (uk)

    Piles of papers are horrendous, but sometimes it is even worse when you organise things and put them in a ‘sensible place’. I went through all my photos last year, well, we had a lot of rainy days; got rid of ones that really were no good, put decent ones in albums, put all the negatives I wanted to keep in another file and discs in a box in a ‘sensible place’. Wanted to send some pictures , needed to find the discs…can remember what the box looked like, can remember putting the discs in it…can’t work out what the hell I did with it next.

  4. Pebbledash

    Recently found your inspiring blog….and I know this scenario well – you think you’re saving paper, using scraps etc but in fact it’s chaos, stray (important) notes you can’t find! Notebooks for me now…
    Hope you find the recipe, it sounds delicious.

  5. Steelkitten

    My husband is an veteran envelope scribbler and is always losing everything. I used to be, then someone gave me a big blank hardback A4 book. Now I carry a notebook everywhere and keep everything in there.

    It’s actually quite fun to drag the old ones down off a shelf and see what was happening in my life at certain time points.

  6. So timely – I’m just furiously searching for my diary which I think hubby has ‘tidied’ away. I found an unopened roll of selotape in my in tray buried under some sewing but not the diary!! Hmm I’ll either have to be a bit tidier or train him a bit better. He likes to think the office/study is his domain! Hope you find your recipe. All mine are in the filing cabinet in a bulging (read broken/breaking) suspension file but when I get round to it the intention is to sort them into a lever arch file with dividers for each type of recipe. Manyana!

  7. Islandgirl

    Hi Fiona
    Your website is a great inspiration to me on my quest for a simpler more sustainable life – and very entertaining to read – every day. Many thanks and carry on the good work.

  8. i hope you find the recipe, it sounds wonderful! the closest we got to so strange a mix was peach and apple jam, well worth a try.

  9. michelle sheets

    Lovely picture today….
    I have a 3 ring binder that I use as a recipe book, and its full of page protectors with section dividers. When I get a new recipe, or am creating something all my own it goes in there, and then I can keep track of it.
    I have some close friends that I made binders for, and then for birthdays and holidays when its present time I give them a recipe to put in their binder, or even better, they give me one for my binder too. Easy presents that make me think of the giver every time I make their dish.

  10. I so know that feeling. I have piles of papers in most rooms and it all adds up to so many places to look when you have to locate one particular piece of paper. The last time this happened it cost me several hundred pounds to get copies of papers referring to the flat I was selling and a week later they turned up in the boot of my car which was probably just about the only place I had not looked. It would be so much easier to find things if either I just put things away immediately or at least piled similar things together. I’m on a bit of a purge at the moment so it is bonanza time for the charity shop downstairs. The shredder has been working overtime and my paper and cardboard bin was full on the last collection day. Apparently real serious hoarding – the kind where there is literally no space left in the house – is a form of OCD (according to the Reader’s Digest magazine I was reading in the bathroom a couple of days ago). Good luck with finding the recipe.

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