How Do You Organize Your Recipes?
I have a red folder in my kitchen cabinet, and this red folder contains the following: A barbecue sauce recipe that I ripped out of a magazine years ago and never made. Scribbled instructions on sticky notes reminding me how to roast pumpkin seeds once a year. Directions from eHow on how to fry anything. Countless handwritten recipes on a variety of paper, including stationery with inspirational quotes, stationery from my first job at the newspaper, and, for whatever reason, Hello Kitty stationery that I don’t remember owning. There are recipes that I use all the time and recipes that I cooked once and immediately forgot about them forever. It’s a mess – and it’s the most organized system I have.
My other “systems” include: a folder in my email full of recipes I found on the Internet and want to try it someday . The Pinterest board where I add recipes that I mostly find while chasing my mother-in-law’s much larger Pinterest board. A recipe box that contains a few recipes that I cook from time to time and a whole bunch that I don’t. And finally, this family recipe book that my husband and I received as a gift, but have not yet written a single thing. Not to mention countless bookmarked recipe books, because I love the pasta salad recipe in one book but Lemon Chicken Orzo Soup in another.
There are a few recipes that I want to keep forever, such as a printed email with detailed instructions from my father instructing my 20-year-old self on how to make mashed potatoes for the first time. (“Add some milk sparingly,” he wisely advised, “because once it’s there, you can’t get it, and you don’t need liquid potatoes.”) And the instructions I wrote down one night after calling my grandmother asked a few months before her death how to make her meatball sauce. But I need a better system.
The binding itself is a pretty good way to organize free recipes, as I use plastic sleeves and dividers to keep my bread recipes separate from recipes for vegetables, main courses, pasta, and desserts. But it quickly overflows with things I want to try (but never will) and yet I find myself digging through my email for a creamy tortellini soup recipe that I sent myself a few weeks ago.
Tell me in the comments: How do you organize your recipes both online and offline? How long do you hold on to a new recipe before you decide you’re never going to make it and it’s time to release it? How often do you go over your physical recipes to remove the ones you’re not using? What apps or other online systems do you use to organize recipes that you don’t want to print yet? How do you even remember that you liked the spicy Thai shrimp you made from that cookbook last week? How do you keep track of and organize the endless recipe options at your disposal?