De-clutter the books...

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Getting the year off to a good start and I'm ready to clear out some books.  The Friends of the Library annual book sale may benefit. I certainly will.  (If you're in Adelaide, you're in luck.) Shelf space and fewer books in piles on the floor will make finding easier.

No point being sentimental about favourite novels.  When they were favourites, I wanted to share them.  I lent them and of course never saw them again, saving me having to de-clutter them.  (Should have kept a record book.)

Cookbooks can be an issue but I find I go back and back to the same ones.  (It's the classics but also still Jamie, still Ottolenghi, still Rick Stein.)  If you can get one recipe from a cookbook, it's a keeper IMO.  So I find I'm discarding some of the more superficially beautiful.  I give an example, a sample of the books I pass on...

The above page is from a glorious coffee-table book AKA as a cook-book. Alinea, is a Chicago restaurant headed by wonder-boy Grant Achatz. It's a massive labour of love, beautifully bound, with glorious photographs - and it weighs a ton.  It's the work of an inspired (and quite mad) chef - a perfectionist.  I never got around to trying anything.  I've shortened the recipe below but you'll get the drift.

PB & J - recipe

• You will need one nice bunch of grapes per person.
• Carefully detach every grape but leave the one at the end. (You may find a way to use the other grapes, another time in another dish.)
• Peal this grape. Wrap its stem in foil, lay on a baking tray and refrigerate.
• Roast peanuts and make a butter by blending with oil, water & salt.
• Slice a baguette very thinly. Sprinkle slices with water to make them malleable.
• Remove grape bunches from the refrigerator and coat each grape in peanut butter.
• Wrap a slice of baguette around each grape. Place on a tray and allow to dry.
• To serve, grill each grape, on both sides (to brown the bread). Dust with crushed peanut “powder”.
• Remove foil from grape stems.  Serve, hanging from a decorative gadget.

​After the books and the filing cabinet will come the thirty five year old lipsticks, the 1950s plastic ear-rings, the wardrobe.  I'm ready to pass on the vintage little black dresses - I will never be that thin again and I won't ever sing like Edith Piaf.  I just don't have the eye brows.
​"Non, je ne regrette rien."


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