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

[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dish (e.g. breads, soups, chicken main dishes, etc.), for which there is a table of contents - this is usually somewhat out of date as I don't redo it more than every couple of years, adding new recipes.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.)