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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?
Thu, Jul 07 2011 at 1:44 PM
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The other night, my Mom was here for dinner and I was serving fish. “I have a great recipe for an easy to throw together sauce I just started making,” I said. I couldn’t find it. I looked in my personal recipe book. I couldn’t find the printout I had made from the Internet. I looked through a pile of recipes I had in one of my cupboards. Not there either. I still haven’t found it.
I was reading on The Wall Street Journal website that professional chefs have problems organizing their recipes, too. It made me feel a little better about my disorganization. Take a look at my personal cookbook above. There are papers falling out of it — and those are just the papers I’ve managed to save.
For a while I tried typing my recipes and saving them on the computer, but that became cumbersome. I like having a book I write in, and I have fantasies about my personal cookbook being an important family heirloom one day.
There is recipe organization software available. Top 10 Reviews seems to have a thorough review of 10 of the ones on the market. Separate software seems to daunting to me, though. I have a feeling it would go the way of the banking software I bought.
There are apps, too. Big Oven has an app that allows you to scan handwritten recipes, and it converts them to digital text. That could come in handy. It’s something I should try out. If I do, I’ll let you know how it works.
The Kitchn has a positive review of a new iPad app called The Recipe Box that I might look into if I get an iPad. Right now, I use my husband’s work iPad. Keeping my recipes on that wouldn’t do. He’d be someplace like Chicago with his iPad when I desperately needed a recipe.
So for now, I’m looking for non-digital methods of organizing my recipes.
Real Simple has 8 Foolproof Methods for organizing recipes. Some of them I can use. They had one idea to make index cards for recipes you like from cookbooks and magazines, and keeping them stored in a box. That gave me a different idea. Instead of copying down entire recipes from cookbooks in my collection, I can just put a page in my personal cookbook with the name of the recipe, a short description, the book it came from, and the page number. That’s a start.
How about your ideas? How do you organize your recipes — either by hand or a digital method? I’d love any and all ideas.
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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.
What is a recipe nest? I've never heard of it.
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.