the recipes that are “ours.”

I try a LOT of recipes.

It started when I moved to Sweden five years ago to study abroad and was suddenly adrift from the meal plan moorings that are a fixture of American universities. The school I went to had its cafeteria in a building called Turner Hall, and we all fondly referred to the Turner Twenty one gained from the single thing Turner always got right: dessert. And then there I was, halfway across the world, and the Chartwells catering truck was nowhere to be seen.

Like a good little internet goblin millennial, I turned to the Internet. The first BudgetBytes recipe I pinned was kismet (it was the Hearty Black Bean Quesadillas, which are one of the only recipes I’ve memorized – see also: internet goblin). I was off and away. And then, after a few years of enjoying myself immensely in university apartment kitchens, I looked up one day (after the whirlwind of getting married right after college had died down) and realized that I had a sizeable stack of cookbooks people had given me, and I had barely cracked a single one. Oj då, we would say in Swedish.

So I began a quest that I described hilariously at the time to “cook through all of my cookbooks, playing fast and loose with the words ‘through’ and ‘all.'” And, despite my initial aim to finish it in a year, it’s still going. (I never finish things, but this one I think I can do, so I’m pushing on. I have 115 recipes left.)

But (and I think I’ve told this story before), hilariously, I had hatched my little plan one afternoon, and not fifteen minutes later I popped open a beautiful edition of America’s Test Kitchen 100 Essential Recipes that my sister-in-law gave me for my birthday and discovered a stark yet eminently reasonable antithesis to the entire philosophy of my plan. “Choose a few good recipes and learn to make them all well,” Chris Kimball had written (paraphrased). And here I was getting ready to start an Excel spreadsheet that at its worst had 332 recipes.

Whoops. I pressed on. A couple times, I stopped to reevaluate. My household consists of one human who is often hungry (predictably the one who also blogs about recipes), one human who is only hungry on Wednesdays (while there’s a full moon in Aquarius and the wind is in the southeast), one dog who will eat anything but probably shouldn’t (he suffers from flatulence caused by overexcitement and the usual dog inability to stomach onions), and three chickens who will eat anything except dried out bread (and sometimes look askance at celery tops when there are GRAPES to be had, but I can’t blame them for that). So am I going to make a pot roast for twelve? Eh, probably not. And I came to this conclusion before it became ill-advised as a matter of public health to invite ten people to your house for dinner. So I’ve done some stripping back from that 332.

Along the way, however, I have discovered yet more sources of recipes (some print, some not). My Paprika recipe app (which is what my spreadsheet eventually became) currently has 787 recipes. And I think my habit of reading cookbooks like novels from the library, copying the recipes I like from them, and emailing them to myself and then forgetting all about them probably leaves another couple hundred gathering dust in my Gmail account. Am I any closer to finding my few good recipes? The odds of that would seem low.

And yet.

I discovered a random recipe for “15-Minute Sheet Pan Chicken Fried Rice” on a random cooking blog. I make it on a half-sheet and have witnessed my husband decimate about 2/3 of it on his own.

Molly Gilbert’s One Pan & Done, the breakout star of my recipe project, has led us to a delicious chicken tikka masala that I love to stick in the oven of a weekend afternoon, a brilliant little salmon dish that takes about ten minutes to throw together, a beautiful carrot soup that I am convinced must be magic, the perfect and simple cinnamon rolls I never thought I’d master, and a bacon biscuit bread that makes any morning beyond decadent.

Many of my old BudgetBytes favorites stand up to the test of time and husbandly whims: the Hearty Black Bean Quesadillas, one-pot beef stroganoff, 6-ingredient bacon spinach pasta (15 minutes! Bacon! Parmesan! Spinach! Pasta! What’s not to love?), my go-to crustless quiche. And we’ve tried new recipes from Beth with great success too: BBQ Chicken Pizza, Creamy Pesto Mac with Spinach, Monterey Chicken Skillet and Cinnamon Pecan Sandies, to name a few.

Test Kitchen brought us the recipes that require a little more work, perhaps, but turn out perfectly every time: smashed potatoes, chocolate chip cookies, spring vegetable pasta, the best cornbread, a cauliflower soup even Sam loved, oven fried bacon and skillet lasagna. (Oven fried bacon, actually, is no work at all.)

Smitten Kitchen was a late entrant to my recipe deep dives, but here’s what we’ve already loved from her site and books: the Everyday Chocolate Cake, the Salted Brown Butter Crispy Treats, the Tarragon Oven Fries method, and the Grilled Bacon Salad with Arugula and Balsamic (or well, I did).

And I won’t say Betty Crocker’s recipes were always a rousing success, but the best damn macaroni and cheese I ever made was hers.

So these are the things that are staying with us. And you know that’s only 26. I think that even leaves room for a few new adventures.