Question for the cooks

[resonant]

How do you manage your recipe collection?

For a long time, I was perfectly happy with my card file. But then I started using tags for LJ/DW, and now everything in life that doesn't have tags is really annoying to me, because why can't one recipe be under Poultry and Grilling and Quick & Easy and Summer and Kidlet's Favorites?

Also, it would be handy to be able to link up a recipe with a side dish that works really well with it, or with another one that uses up the leftover roast chicken or the other half of that tub of ricotta or what have you. Maybe even to see when was the last time I cooked it.

I've been half tempted to post my recipes as locked DW entries so I could tag them, or to start a new journal just for recipes. But I'm betting there's some better way out there.

Comments

[myalexandria]

let me know when you find out, because I also have this problem. I have mine in a binder (plus cookbooks) but find I rarely use it except to look up old favorites; if I want to do something new I more often than not search for an ingredient on foodblogsearch and see what comes up.

[resonant]

I have a lovely card file -- I tend to put things on cards even when I've never made them, just because cards are the most convenient thing to cook from, and I would expect to continue doing that. (I am not keeping my computer in the kitchen. I've seen what collects on the top of the refrigerator!)

I guess what I need is a searchable, taggable index to the card file, and, secondarily, the handful of cookbooks I still have and the handful of online recipes I haven't put down on cards yet. Plus it would be useful to be able to access my recipes when I'm at my parents' so I could cook for them.

[libitina]

I love my food blog for this. I hadn't expected it to work as well as it has, but I really find it easily searchable and taggable and joyous.

[resonant]

I forget -- do I have your food blog on my circle or not? What's it called?

I'm seriously considering the blog as an option; seems to me that it would do much the same thing as GoogleDocs or Springpad or whatever, without my having to learn a new interface. Plus people might talk to me, always a plus.

[raine]

I do a ton of cooking from Food Network recipes, so I don't probably have my recipes as organized as they could be, as I often just go up to foodnetwork.com and pull what I want from there. But if I was to be more organized, I'd probably wind up buying something like this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001HUJUT4?ie=UTF8&tag=ttr_cookbookrecipe-software-20

[resonant]

Interesting. I used to have a piece of specialized food-management software -- this was so long ago that it came on floppy disks -- I think it was essentially a HyperCard stack with some fields pre-defined. But I didn't want to retype everything. Now I'm thinking that retyping everything may be unavoidable.

[carolyn_claire]

I have a separate Delicious acct that I use for recipes--I wanted the multi-tag capabilities, though I haven't gone through them and done all that, yet. My printed-out recipes are...somewhere. Online is so much easier for me.

[resonant]

I hardly ever use online recipes, and when I do, I copy them onto notecards, because I don't want my computer in my kitchen. So Delicious would only be half a solution, because I'd still have to get all the recipes online so Delicious could link to them.

[sara]

Three-ring binder. Because I mostly extemporize, so I don't need all that many resumes, and any more when I do try new stuff it often arrives, one way or another, on 8 1/2" by 11" paper.

[resonant]

I used to use a three-ring binder, but found it unwieldy to cook from. I don't really extemporize much -- you'd think I could, much as I cook, but I find that when I don't have a recipe and a meal plan, I tend to make the same four things over and over.

[starwatcher]

.
I say - why not a DW recipe account? And no need to lock it - your friends might enjoy some fresh ideas.
.

[resonant]

Several people have recommended that, and it would definitely have an advantage in that I already know how to do it. I dread the typing, but there's probably no way around it.

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

Any particular reason you wouldn't want to just put them on this account? I mean, if you didn't want to spam everybody, you could put them up in batches, or you could backdate some of them?

Come to think of it, this is a good idea. I'm pretty sure the only family recipe I'm not supposed to share is the sauerbraten and sauce....

[resonant]

I'm thinking I'd rather have a separate DW for food, and then people can sub to one or both as they choose. Maybe we'll wind up with a whole network of fannish food blogs.

Or maybe a recipe community -- though I don't know ... tag control would be a nightmare, since the tags that are meaningful to one of us wouldn't necessarily be meaningful to others. ("Kidlet's favorite," for instance -- unless the rest of y'all want to come cook for my eleven-year-old, which you're more than welcome to do.)

[viggorlijah]

Delicious is used a lot for recipes, if they're online. You can make a tag group and use it with your current delicious account as well.

I've been on-off using springpad for the past three months and I really do like it. (http://springpadit.com/springpad/#apps/app/recipebox) I'm about to sort out my Lent mealplan on it, and the nice thing is that it's easy to follow the receipes and shopping lists on my iphone.

I went through a bunch of online apps for mealplanning, but most of them were proprietary. Springpad allows more flexibility.

[resonant]

Most of my recipes aren't online, unfortunately, so Delicious is only half a solution.

You'd think there'd be good meal-planning software out there, wouldn't you? I explored some options, and none of them really looked significantly better than those books where the pages are split in three and you can turn top, center, and bottom independently.

Springpad is interesting; I can see where if you had that, you'd find that it solved a lot of different problems for you. Dr. Google is divided about whether it's better than Evernote -- have you tried that one?

[exceptinsects]

I put them in my Gmail account, with tags. Works great.

[resonant]

I didn't even know Gmail could tag!

[maire]

Why lock the entries?

[resonant]

Well, I didn't want to spam the people who are mostly here for the smut. Now I'm considering just starting up a separate DW journal just for recipes and nonfannish food content.

[isilya]

Evernote is sickly cool, I use it to organise my entire life. Receipts, bills, tax stuff, web pages, wishlist items -- everything gets dropped into Evernote. Recipes as well! What is even cooler is that you can then access your Evernote notebooks from any computer with internet access -- particularly a netbook. There's also an iPhone app.

And everything is not only tagged (hierarchical tags available) but also searchable. You can also share notebooks with anybody (they don't have to have Evernote accounts) so you can share your recipes with family if you like.

[resonant]

It looks interesting! Do you have an opinion about Evernote vs. Springpad?

[misspamela]

I just re-google everything. The internet is my recipe box?

[ellen_fremedon]

This.

[yarngeek]

Also endorsing delicious. The food tag is for stuff found on the internet; the my_food tag is for, well, stuff I made. New-to-me recipes get posted on dw/lj and tagged in delicious.

[resonant]

New-to-me recipes get posted on dw/lj and tagged in delicious.

Rather than just using dw's tags? ... but I guess that's because all your other food stuff is already in delicious, right?

[fullygoldy]

I've got an old fashioned box for my oldest recipes - stuff I copied from Mom when I moved out. But for my own collection, I started out with one of those "magnetic" photo albums, so I cut out the recipe and stick it in the book - the clear cover sheet also keeps the pages clean, or at least easy to wipe if spilled on. Then I added category dividers and 3-ring binder sheet protectors for full page items. I'm up to 2 volumes now. The funny thing is that about 10 yrs ago, I learned my sister came up with the exact same thing for her recipes - and we lived on opposite coasts and had never discussed it with each other.

Your tagging sounds cool though. But I don't think I'd have the discipline to get all my stuff converted. It took me years to type up the group of recipes that I regularly share so I wouldn't have to do it every single time.

[resonant]

I have a marvelous recipe box -- my parents bought a drawer out of an old card catalog and gave it to me, so it will hold about four times as many cards as a typical box, and it has a little sliding clippy thing to expand and compress the amount of available space. But if I started cross-referencing (one copy of the frittata recipe under Breakfast, another under Vegetarian), I'd quickly run out card space.

Typing them all in is the sort of project I could see enjoying, as long as I didn't have to do it in a hurry. Plus, at work I have access to a printer that can handle cardstock and a professional-quality paper cutter, so if I could set up recipe cards with cutting guides in Publisher, I could store a recipe online and print a copy for the card file. Because I really don't want my computer in the kitchen.

[celandineb]

I currently deal with recipes three ways: (a) in one huge word processing file, typing in new recipes at the end as I try them and decide they're keepers, and can thereby find them by searching for keywords/ingredients although it can take some effort; (b) as separate entries in an LJ comm, where they are tagged, but by no means all the recipes are up there, it's an ongoing process; (c) in an actual printed cookbook, based on (a) but organized by type of dish (e.g. breads, soups, chicken main dishes, etc.), for which there is a table of contents - this is usually somewhat out of date as I don't redo it more than every couple of years, adding new recipes.

I used to have a card file but some of my recipes are really too long to fit on a card, and the total number had exceeded the size of the box to boot. Actually I still have the card box somewhere, just don't use it. At one point too I had the recipes in a database, which was more easily searchable (and I had fields that served basically as tags), but since the DB was created by me there were always some formatting/printing issues.

The drawback with having them on the computer is that either the computer has to be in the kitchen (risky!), or you have to print out the recipe(s) you want to use. OTOH, they're much easier to label/search. The cookbook is safer/easier for actual use, but not as easy to search (although browsing works well), and always lacking a few recently-acquired recipes. Hence my use of multiple formats...

[resonant]

I do have the problem of some recipes not fitting on cards. I've also discovered another problem -- since I hand-write the cards, I shorten the recipe as much as I can, and I've found that the kidlet can't cook from my cards because so much of the crucial information isn't on there! (My minestrone "recipe," for instance, is just a list of ingredients with brackets drawn around them to indicate which ones go into the pot together.)

[the_shoshanna]

I use YummySoup! from Hungry Seacow Software, because, well, Hungry Seacow Software! *g* and because it had hands down the best importer from other websites I saw when I went looking and comparing, as well as other good features. I still have a shelf of cookbooks and a box of cards, too, but recipes I find online, if I like or expect I'll like them/want to make them more than once, go into YummySoup.

[resonant]

Ooh, ratings. That would be useful. (I suppose I could just have *****, ***, etc., as tags.)

Hungry Seacow is adorable, as is YummySoup.

[katallison]

Seconding earlier rec for Evernote -- it is fantastically convenient. (And free!) An added bonus is that Evernote has the capacity to search for text *within images* -- so if you have a lot of older recipes on paper that you want to integrate into the system, you can scan them, pull them into Evernote, tag them, but also search within them if needed.

[resonant]

Huh. Wonder if it could read my handwriting?

Do you have an opinion about Evernote vs. Springpad?

[devildoll]

I keep all mine in Google docs, stored in a Recipe folder and then sub-folders (Salads, Mains, Cakes, Desserts, etc), which serve basically as tags. So you could put a recipe in the Poultry and Grilling and Quick & Easy and Summer and Kidlet's Favorites folders, for instance.

This obviously has the added bonus of being available to me wherever I can get online, and I can just pull up a recipe, put my laptop on the kitchen counter, and cook away. Lucky people with internet access on their phones can double-check for ingredients while shopping--someday, that will be me (I hope)!

[resonant]

I never would have thought of Google Docs. And you're right, "copies" on the internet take up no space, so I could put things in as many folders as I wanted to.

[norah]

I use delicious for the ones that are online. But for my regular ones i just leaf through the binder of printouts and notes until I find them - sorry I'm not more help!

[resonant]

Yeah, that's pretty much where I am. I mean, at least I've got a card file, but it's sprouting odder and odder categories -- "for leftover meat and poultry," "lowfat fruit desserts," "not vegetarian but low-meat."

[lee_rowan]

I have one or two books that I use a lot, and a document file where I cut-paste recipes that I like. Most of them wind up stuck between the pages of my 'old reliable' books, and if I lose the sheet, I can print up another. (Note to self: back up on external drive!)

This isn't a particularly efficient method, but it works for me because most of what I make is pretty simple (who needs a recipe for 'put beans in crockpot, add garlic and onion and cumin and a little salt and whatever extras look tasty?)

My wife's a mathematician. I cook, she bakes. She has file boxes and recipe books and a whole notebook of fruitcake recipes from one of her great-aunts. She's the organized one.

All this reminds me, I need to go check the beans...

[jelazakazone]

This caught my eye. My hubby is a mathematician. He's a much better baker than I am. And he's the organized one. But he put all the recipes on the computer. We do have little books he made that are on the kitchen counter so we can refer to recipes we use a lot.

[jelazakazone]

DH has been collecting recipes and putting them in files on the computer since before I met him, so that's how we work. He's divided the recipes in a bunch of different categories. But to be honest, I'm terrible with recipes. I like to cook from experience/off the top of my head and don't refer to recipes very often any more. It's handy to have all the recipes on the computer though.

[resonant]

As of about 1989, my recipes were all typed into the computer -- but it was a different kind of computer, and I don't even remember what word processor I was using. TextEdit will still open that file, but it has an awful lot of garble in it.

HTML is superior for that reason -- it should stay readable as time goes by. Though the spouse is fond of saying "Anything that's important should exist in three dimensions."

[indeliblesasha]

Hiya, :) I stumbled across this entry and it got me to thinking...

What DH and I are currently brainstorming is a blog/journal with tagging ability. I'd create an entry for each recipe I use, find, etc. and tag it appropriately.

The entry will have a link to where I found it online or which cookbook it's in, page number, whatever, and if it's been printed and put in my binder. I figure I'll just add to the journal as I make recipes rather than face back-entry. I mean, it works for libraries. They only have one copy of the book but you can search for it on the computer by name or author or keyword and it tells you what section to find it in. :) Why not do the same for your hardcopy recipes?

I figured for you it might be a decent solution, you can cross reference without having to make multiple cards, and I saw in one of your comments your Kidlet needs better instructions, so you could include those in the entries instead of having to make new cards. :)

(Thanks for the kick-in-the-pants to tackle this project myself. :)

[libitina]

So I left this tag open because I wanted to see what the comments suggested. And it just resurfaced to the top of the queue (yes, that's exactly how far behind I am reading fic).

What have you tried? What were your thoughts?