How to store recipes

[JoAnn L.]

Any ideas on how to store recipes? I have so many cookbooks were there is only 1 or 2 recipes I want to keep. I will write them in a notebook. Then I donate the cookbooks to our St. Vincent De Paul resale store, (of course that leaves room in my cabinet for more cookbooks that I just "have" to buy).
But I have 4 or 5 of those notebooks full of recipes that I have written down, in no certain order. What a mess. I can't find anything I am looking for.
What do you do?

 

[kats]

My recipes are a mess too, but I'm trying to organize them in word documents, in folders, separated by group (appetizers, meat, pasta, desserts etc). It might work.

 

[southerncooker]

Some people I know use master cook to store their's online. I have used master cook some but it sure takes awhile to get them all in and then like you I sometimes forget which cookbook I stored them in in MC. But MC does have a search feature which will find it for you. I love finding cookbooks at thrift stores wish you lived near me. LOL Anyway hope you get some good ideas. I'll be watching maybe I'll get more organized too since I have lots of those notebooks laying around in additon the the over 1000 cookbooks I can't let go of. You sound like a good canidate for a cookbook collectors group I'm in at yahoo.

 

[JCook]

I came across the same problem. So I made my own cookbook. I typed of all of my favorite recipes from all my cookbooks and I printed them out and binded them all together to create my own cookbook. Another thing I do is I keep a 3 ring binder with printed out recipes in it and I catorigize it by different things. Like all the chicken recipes are under chicken, etc. This helps me find the recipe I want easier than if I just threw them in the binder.

 

[JCook]

kats

my step mom does exactly what you are talking about it works great for her. When she comes across a recipes she types it up and places it in the section she wants then when she needs a recipe she just prints it out or just pulls it up on the computer.

 

[vagriller]

kats

my step mom does exactly what you are talking about it works great for her. When she comes across a recipes she types it up and places it in the section she wants then when she needs a recipe she just prints it out or just pulls it up on the computer.

You could also upload your recipes to an online club and keep them there. Recipezaar.com might let you do that. You could probably find a lot of your recipes there to save lots of typing. If you have hundreds of recipes it would be a daunting task to type them all up!

edit: I just checked and it will let you submit your own recipes. You could find one online that is close to your, cut, paste, and edit and save it. Voila!

 

[digigirl]

I used to use Master Cook, but I recently bought Big Oven software (www.bigoven.com). I like it a lot. (Big Oven easily imported all the stuff I had in Master Cook, so it was a cinch to switch over).

Like you, I don't want to have to keep cookbooks or magazines that only have a few recipes I like. Plus, even with the ones I do keep, I can't always find a recipe I'm remembering, you know? Or, sometimes, I want to be able to find everything for a particular ingredient or of a particular type. Hard to do with physical cookbooks.

So, whenever I find a recipe I really like, I plug it into Big Oven. Or, if I ever have a few extra minutes, I'll pull out cookbooks and type a few of the good recipes in. Eventually, I'll get them all in there. I can rate them, give them keywords and categorize them, so with the search function, it's really easy to find what I want.

Plus, it makes importing recipes from the Internet super quick and easy. You just copy the web page you want, then paste it into the "import" screen, use their buttons to identify the title, the ingredients, the instructions, etc. and hit the Import button. Works like a charm, and waaayy faster than retyping everything all the time.

Valerie

Oh PS - the other cool thing is being able to just print out a recipe and not worry about getting it dirty. I can just throw it away afterwards. Recipes that I use over and over all the time, I keep in sheet protectors in a 3-ring binder in the kitchen, but that's only the super-often used ones. Everything else stays on the computer.

 

[unmuzzleme]

When I went to college, I copied all my favorite Mom, Grandma, etc., recipes on 4X6 notecards and slipped them into a cute photo album book with clear sleeves. I organized them by category (as you would in a cookbook), and in alphabetical order.

This took a little while, but it makes staying organized pretty easy. It's also nice because the recipe cards stay clean, and any mess that gets on the plastic sheets is easy to wipe off. I can also very easily add any new recipes.

I think this is a good trick for me, since I don't have a billion recipes (though I'm working on it!). It might be a little tedious for someone with an enourmous collection.

 

[jkath]

unmuzzleme, I did the same thing!
I got lucky, though, because when I went looking for photo albums, Kohl's was having one of their spectacular sales, and ended up pricing each album for $2. I bought all 6 that matched.

 

[Piccolina]

I love keeping my recipes in notebooks; one thing that I do to help with ease of recipe finding is to leave a few blank pages at the start of the notebook. I number each of the pages in the book and as I add a recipe I write the page number and recipe title at the start of the book (on the reserved blank pages). This way instead of having to flip through all the pages it just takes a few seconds to scan through the recipe titles.

 

[vagriller]

For those that plan to keep their cookbooks, you could create an index of all your favorite recipes as a quick guide.

 

[JoAnn L.]

Great Ideas.

Hey---thank you all so much. You all have given me some great ideas. You are all terrific.

 

[kats]

You are giving me the courage to start typing and organizing... But the truth is that, until today, I'm far less than organized. Sometimes I want to make something I made before and I can't find my notes...

 

[urmaniac13]

We are in the process of putting all our recipes collected into a database which Cris formatted with MS Access. It has a search engine using either the recipe title or ingredient, thus we can get to the recipe we are looking for easily.
We are entering them in italian and Cris has to verify everything I write up, because if I misspell something it will not work... that's why it stalled in the middle of the process, he never has enough time for looking through hundreds of recipes!!