- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 5
-
Sparkle (0)
It's easy enough to find enticing recipes. But then what? How do organized cooks keep their favorite recipes readily at hand for quick reference? And how do we save promising-looking recipes for later? What a mixed-media challenge! Great recipes from friends and family. Shelves of cookbooks. Monster stacks of glorious food magazines. Clippings from newspaper food sections. Napkin notes. E-mail. Online sources including, our favorites of course! food blogs.
In a two-part series, I'll share some of my own (admittedly hyper-organized) tips for organizing recipes. First up, let's talk about saving our favorite recipes. In the next post, we'll tackle saving promising-looking "to try" recipes.
ORGANIZING OUR FAVORITE RECIPES
Our most important recipes are the ones we make again and again, the tried and true. Sure, many become embedded in our brains. But what about the recipes we only make once a year, maybe for a favorite someone's birthday? or only when the peaches are especially gorgeous? or only when mushrooms are on sale?
SOLUTION #1 (3x5 recipe cards kept in two recipe boxes)
For a long time, I faithfully copied favorite recipes onto 3x5 cards. Most stayed in the 'big recipe box' but a frequent favorites were kept in a small wooden recipe box -- yes, the recipe box in the photo -- stored right next to the salt. With only a few dividers, breakfast, soup, supper and maybe 50 recipes, it was easy to find exactly what I wanted to make. I still love this solution. Frankly, I miss this solution.
PERSONAL NOTES - The cards are penciled, "11/00 made for Mom/Dad on their way to Florida" and "next time try w 2x spices". These littles notes are what I miss the most.
EASY to BROWSE Every season or so, I culled the collection, moving cards to and from the big box.
HANDY SHOPPING It was easy to grab a recipe card and head for the grocery.
EASY TO LOSE The downside of the solution is that it was so easy to misplace a recipe card, leaving it in a grocery cart or at a friend's house, for example.
BIGGER & BIGGER BOX The more I cook, the more great recipes I collected and the more I grew out of this solution.
SOLUTION #2 (combination of digital, paper & online)
This technique has been life-changing for me. I now put favorite recipes into a Word document, using bookmarks to organize by course, keeping the chicken recipes and the broccoli recipes together. To start, I devoted a couple of hours to input a couple of dozen recipes. Now I add two or three a month as they're cooked.
To keep the document manageably short, I use my own recipe shorthand. For example, this Kitchen Parade recipe for lemon turkey noodle soup turns out:
LEMON TURKEY SOUP 1T oil, 2c onion, 4cl garlic, 3 celery, 3 carrots, 1 red pepper. 8c hot broth, Parmesan rind, B2B, simmer 20min. MA2H. ½c orzo or 1c “bigger” pasta, cook 10min. 1lz/lj, 3c cooked turkey, 8oz spinach, S&P. 45min2T, 20minHO. WW10=3
[Translations: cl=clove; B2B=bring to boil; MA2H=make ahead to here; 1lz/lj=zest/juice of 1 lemon; S&P=salt & pepper; 45min2T=45 minutes to table; 20minHO=20 minutes hands-on; WW10=3 = makes 10 cups, each cup is 10 Weight Watchers points]
But here's where the real magic happens.
SHOPPING I keep a copy in the car, making last-minute grocery stops a breeze. There's no forgetting which vegetables are in minestrone or how much ricotta is in Mom's Lasagna.
PORTABILITY I take a copy along when visiting my dad and friends and am likely to be called upon to cook.
EVERYWHERE I e-mail a copy to my g-mail address so it's always waiting online.
SOLUTION #3 - Yours!
Are you organized about saving favorite recipes? What works for you and why? Are you looking for a new solution? What are the most important features of the solution that will work for you? Remember, in this post, we're talking about our favorite recipes because ...
NEXT UP: "To Try Recipes"
We'll tackle ideas the much harder idea of saving "to try" recipes, ones that look great that we can't bear parting with because they'll be so handy for supper later this month or because it would be fun with the kids or would be perfect for when the tomatoes are first ripe or for a dinner party some time, maybe ...
BlogHer food editor Alanna Kellogg started saving recipes for 'boiled cauliflower' and 'beanie weinie' about
