I'm a big fan of the working kitchen. I like my pots hanging on a rack, my knives at the ready on a magnetic bar. And while there will always be a special place in my heart for the recipe binder, I find I'm much more likely to actually make a recipe if it's not filed on a shelf, inside a book, behind an entrées/pasta/vegetarian tab. I have much more success when I've posted a clipping where I can see it—on a bulletin board, or inside a cabinet. Aside from providing an easy reference before I hit the grocery store, it eliminates the momentum-crushing motion of bobbing back and forth from saucepan to binder.
When I renovated my kitchen this year, I decided to take the practice a step further by having an illustrator named Gina Triplett paint my favorite family recipes inside a cabinet door next to the stove: Grandma Catrino's biscotti, Great Grandma Turano's meatballs, the "mud cake" from my best friend's childhood birthday parties, and Marcella Hazan's milk-braised pork, which Aunt Patty made the first time I met my husband's family, in 1992. Now I have a private living memorial to those who have influenced me in the kitchen, and my kids will grow up with a certain reverence for these dishes. It doesn't even matter that I now know the recipes by heart—mostly, it's just nice to know they're there.
Try this in your own kitchen: Triplett started by giving the door a coat of paint similar to the outside color. (This allowed her to paint over any mistakes she made along the way.) She then sketched out the words in pencil and went over them using a superfine paintbrush dipped in black paint.
