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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[sara]

Ah, yeah -- six months of the year I have a CSA share, which forces me to be creative. And then it's winter, and we don't much care if we eat the same thing over and over again because we know pretty soon it'll be May again and we'll have to come up with three ways to have kale in a week. ;>

[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.)

[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?

[resonant]

I didn't even know Gmail could tag!

[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.

[resonant]

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

[resonant]

See, I hardly ever look online for recipes. I've got too many recipes from magazines, cookbooks, my mother ...

[libitina]

It's a WordPress blog.

NoCounterspace.net

I mainly stated putting content there because there are food blogger potlucks, and I wanted to get invited to one of those! But it has ended up being surprisingly useful.

[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?

[libitina]

I've created a feed for it on livejournal, but not on DW. And I'll warn you if you go to RSS it that sometimes I'll spend a day writing 4-6 entries all at once.

[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.

[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.)

[libitina]

BTW - so I have the genius food site in the works. Only it's just building slowly and I'd been thinking we wouldn't focus recipe archives because there are so many (and I'd thought most of them were good, so it's weird to find out that a lot of people aren't using them).

But what about something like allrecipes.com, which is user generated content. Is it the lack of personalized tagging or the OMG all your stuff right out in the open for other people to judge that makes something like that not appeal?

[resonant]

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

Hungry Seacow is adorable, as is YummySoup.

[resonant]

Huh. Wonder if it could read my handwriting?

Do you have an opinion about Evernote vs. Springpad?

[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.

[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."

[resonant]

A couple of years ago, I got rid of most of my cookbooks -- I had too many of them that I was only keeping around for one or two recipes, so I copied the recipes and gave the cookbooks away.

I wish I could do that "cook from the seat of your pants" thing, but I tend to default to the same four dishes over and over.

[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."

[resonant]

Cool! [drops a bookmark into the Blogs folder]

[resonant]

CSA is like Iron Chef, isn't it? This year either I'm going to figure out some way to enjoy beets or I'm going to hang out in the parking lot haggling. "Trade these for your turnip greens? C'mon, you're a Yankee, you were just going to throw them away ..."