How do you organize your recipes?
Between cookbooks, magazines, printed recipes, friends’ recipes and recipes saved online, how is a home cook supposed to stay organized?
| Previous Post Kraft sneaks veggies into its Mac & Cheese | Next Post Seasonal recipes: 5 watermelon cocktails |
Comments
When I cook a recipe from a book, I take a photo of it with my iPhone and view it on my iPad in the kitchen (use Dropbox or Evernote). It keeps the book clean, and I now have an electronic copy I can consult later from any of my devices.
I'm starting to use YummySoup, an application available on Mac computers through the App Store and coming soon to iOS devices like iPhone and iPad! It's great because it will pull recipes off the most popular recipe sites automatically!
When I find a recipe online that I like, I print it as a .pdf and then save it to my hard drive (so it's not actually printed). The recipe then gets organized in to subtypes - Main Courses (then by protein, Beef, Chicken, Seafood, Vegetarian), Salads (again then organized into Noodle, Meat, Vegetarian, etc). I also have a recipe card holder and tons of cookbooks, but mostly cook from online sources and a few select recipes & cookbooks anymore.
I have a lot of recipes saved as .pdf's, but sadly I never organized them. It's just one of the many places I now have to look when I think, "I know I saw a recipe for that once..." Good for you for being organized with it.
I'm stuck on notecards - it's convenient and fast. I guess I'm a bit old school! :( But I do have a box only for recipes that both my husband and I like the most. That way I never prepare a mean that neither of us likes.
My recipes--sigh---I collect cookbooks and generally can remember where a recipe is in those cookbooks. My grandmother's recipe cards are a mess though and float around the house. I am in the process of scanning them in and blogging them. New recipes I find on the Internet, I use Evernote to "clip them."
I checked out one of the other readers recommendations for eatyourbooks.com for the cookbook problem. It seems like an excellent way to know what's in your cookbooks. There's a $25 yearly fee, but if you have a lot of cookbooks, it looks worth it.
It would be a great idea except...the cookbooks I collect tend to be long out of print and even less likely to be indexed. There are less than two dozen that are less than twenty years old. Many are church and community cookbooks or pre-1978 cookbooks or manufacturer cookbooklets.
I know a lot of people who love EatYourBooks though. It's a great idea if you don't have a super quirky cookbook collection like I do.
Two systems work for me. On computer - a Recipe folder broken down into category folders: main dish, vegetarian, poultry, etc. These are only printed out if I'm going to use them, and I print them out on the backs of the extra sheets that are blank in credit card invoices or other. Secondly - print outs go into 3 ring notebook with categorized sections. Cookbook indexes are the other resources.
A walking partner just told me about her mother's old family recipe book. Recipes were pasted on the pages of another book. So imagine the surprise when Auto Mechanic turns out to be a gold mine of canning recipes.
I use eatyourbooks.com It's a recipe database where you create a bookshelf of the cookbooks you own, and you search for recipes within those books. I've been using my own books instead of printing off more loose sheets of paper from the Internet.
I just checked eatyourbooks.com out. It seems very helpful. I love that they are adding blogs, too.
Thanks for the recommendation.
I use a Recipe Nest. It holds all formats of recipes and I no longer have to punch holes! I agree with you - I think it's important to have your favorite recipes in a hard copy format that you can pass along to future generations.
