organize my recipes

My messy notebook of random recipes ripped out from magazines and written on the back of scrap paper is no more! All my recipes are now on my computer organized into folders. I can search and even made a spreadsheet of menus.

on a daily basis, deleting, reading, writing down, eliminating duplicates, searching, weeding through computer files, picking new ones to try.
I’ve come to a point where this is actually a fun activity – I enjoy it and I don’t let it take over my life.

But it looks like this is going to be a looong-term project. At this rate, it might take something between 1 and 2 years.

The end is far-far away, but I am finally moving conistently towards it!

• myrecipes.com (consisting mostly of cooking light recipes)
• epicurious.com
• sparkrecipes.com
• allrecipes.com
• finecooking.com
• mayoclinic.com
• kingarthurflour.com

I also have a selection of weightwatchers, ediets, and foodfit recipes saved in word format. (I no longer receive their newslettes).

Lately I’ve been cooking a lot, and I’ve just been writing them down in my notebook… and it’s getting difficult to find them, so I need to just take an afternoon and find all of them and put them somewhere I can access them easily.

This should be easy peasy lemon squeezy!

I think I cheated…

my sister made a recipe book and I jsut added mine to it!

It’s really a great lot. They are all in a box.But the box is for since a long time to small.I haven’t tested them all.Perhaps I should put the testet recipes in a separate box.And then I have to cook and cook and cook

I put everything together in one place.
Which is, a 4-shelf library in the corridor.
On the 2 top shelves I have my cookbooks and the magazines I plan to keep intact (mainly issues of Fine Cooking and various BHG publications).
In the lower 2 shelves, I have separated my recipes by season: Magazines, clippings and printouts that are season-specific are divided in 4 piles: spring, summer, fall, and winter.
Then, I have a box where a keep the rest of the recipes.
Also on the lowest shelf, I have all my binders and notebooks that I have been using so far.
- I will transfer ‘tried and approved’ recipes into my 2 new notebooks (and also enter them into sparkrecipes.com to see their nutritional value).
- I will maintain a binder (or more) with maybe/someday recipe clippings to try out.
- I will toss the rest: mediocre recipes I’ve tried once and have categorized as flops but am still holding on to thinking I should be able to find some way to improve them, as well as the ones i’d never try for various reasons (too time-consuming, ingredients we don’t like, etc)
Edit: – I’m also thinking of a separate binder, with traditional Greek recipes. This would be more like reference material, with recipes and ingredients and techniques that are rare and sometimes forgotten. I’ve been collecting these for so long, it seems like a waste to toss these.

...is the correct word.
I already have an organizing system in place, which made sense when my recipes were in the range of hundreds. Right now, they’re out of control. Basically, I can’t find one when I need it.

I have bought 2 large notebooks (one for savory and one for sweet), and I will write there the recipes I consider keepers. The drawback is I won’t have photographs, but I am ready to accept this, since my clippings and printouts are simply too many to handle.

I am keeping my cookbooks and magazines (of course), storing them in one place, bookmarking favorites. Gradually I will add these into my notebooks as well.

About, oh, 2 years ago, I organized my old recipe clippings, went through my cookbooks, etc. and planned menus based on them. Some of the food was good, some not so much. I’ve been re-making the keeper recipes since. There are enough that the same food doesn’t come up all the time, but still—I feel ready for something new.

Again I’ve been clipping recipes that strike me as interesting for a while now and, as before, they have piled up. I have a few new cookbooks my husband bought me for Christmas (at my request) that I’ve yet to crack open.

Basically, I’m looking at doing the same thing I’ve done before: go through the recipes and decide what I want to actually cook, enter the keepers into my recipe database (I have my existing sorted recipes in a computer program—search for “chicken parmesan” . . . so easy to find whatever I’m looking for!), make up some menus, get the ingredients, cook it.

Making new food is fun, although a disastrous result when you’re hungry can be pretty frustrating :). It’s always a good time to set a plate of something in front of my husband, “Now, I think this food was supposed to be chunky like that . . . maybe . . . I don’t know . . .” The blue soup scene in Bridget Jones? I’ve never done anything like that! No, not me! No, I am NOT PROTESTING TOO MUCH, what are you implying?

but it’s a worthy goal. I’ve been collecting recipes and cookbooks since I was 12. I have hundreds. I REALLY want the recipe organizer computer program that Apple makes, but I am going to wait until I get my MacBook (next year, hopefully). It seems like a great way to organize, since you can search by ingredient or keyword, and you can also download recipes from the web (cooks.com, allrecipes.com, etc.) and it auto-formats them for you. Until then, I just want to go through all my clippings, magazines, notebooks, etc. and decide which ones I really want to keep.