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

[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?

[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]

I actually had forgotten allrecipes.com existed, but I'm really going to have to be able to customize my tags if I'm going to bother with all thsi typing!