Here's an edited version. It's just under 2,000 words. If that's too big for the forum rules, I'll send it as PM.
It's no trouble for me to read with a pencil in my hand. You'll find many recipes in my cook
books have a series of numbers in pencil above them. This is my self-sufficiency rating for the recipe. It will look something like this:
3/5/2
The first number, 3, is the quantity of ingredients I raise or make myself.
The second number is the quantity of ingredients that I CAN raise or can make, but don't always.
The last number is how many ingredients I have to purchase.
I want to be as self-sufficient as possible and I wanted to see how store-dependent different recipes were? I rate my regularly used recipes and recipes which interest me. This method also shows what I can do to be more self-sufficient.
Ideally, every recipe would be 7/0/0 or such, but that's not realistic for my situation. I don't have a farm or farm animals. If I'm making fresh corn soup, for example, the ingredients are: onion, fresh corn, stock, chives, butter, salt & pepper.
I mark the ingredients I raise or regularly produce with a minus sign (-), the ingredients I can raise or make, but don't always with a tilde (~). I don't mark store-bought ingredients.
My marked up copy would be:
- onion
fresh corn~
stock~
- chives
butter
salt
pepper
I add the minus signs and the tildes, and then go down that many items in the ingredient list and count the number remaining. That is the quantity of ingredientsI have to buy. So, for this recipe, I'd pencil over the recipe:
2/2/3
My goal is to make that first number (items produced at home) as large as possible and the middle and last numbers zero.
I had a crop failure for my corn but intend to plant corn again, so the numbers for my corn soup
should change to 3/1/3.
If I ever get where I regularly make stock instead of buying it, then I'll have succeeded in making the recipe as self-sufficient as possible in my present conditions.
The only problem with this system is that I want to be overly optimistic. For the fresh corn soup, I
could make my own butter, but I've only done so once in about 30 years. It isn't likely I'll do so regularly unless I get a cow, goat or something else changes. If that happens? I'll change the numbers. The ratings aren't static, it was designed specifically to change (why I do this in pencil).