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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[starwatcher]

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

[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....

[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.

[exceptinsects]

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

[maire]

Why lock the entries?

[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.

[misspamela]

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

[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.

[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.

[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...

[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.

[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.

[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)!

[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!

[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]

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.

[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?