How do you organize your recipes?

I still use the old-fashioned system of printing them out and keeping them in a folder, but it drives me crazy trying to find one. I usually rewrite recipes to remove extra words and make it easier for me to cook from them. Does anyone have suggestions for a better way of saving and organizing recipes?

I use a 3 ring binder. I print out the recipe and punch holes in it. And just like in high school, I have dividers with those color coded tabs (making sections). I keep my favorite recipes towards the front of each section.

Chicken, Beef, Desserts, Casseroles, Breads & Pretzels, and Misc.

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I don’t know that it’s better, but I use Paprika for online recipes

I use Eat your books for cookbooks and magazine subscriptions

I use print outs, ripped out pages, and copies in a folder for the rest which I cannot find in the above, have been using for decades, and fear loosing, like some hot sauces, yellow cake, candied nuts.

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I have a lot of written recipes (cook books, small index binders from my parents), but if I am going to work with one I’ll enter it into a text file, replace all but the smallest volumetric measurements to weight. Those are saved in a centralized directory on my server, and I’ll copy most of them to Google Keep where they are available on my kitchen tablet, phone, and can be shared to family and friends.

Both Keep and my text editor can search through all of them for specific ingredients.

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Me, too. I love Paprika!

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I email recipes to myself and tag them “Recipes” in my Google inbox. When I use the “share” link button and share to email, it’s easy as can be and usually titles the email for me with the recipe name. Over the years I have learned to copy and paste the written recipe into the email, as links often break and recipes disappear. This also makes it easier to search by ingredient. I also have tags for vegetarian, gluten free, low carb, dessert, etc.

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I don’t have a single method, but rather a combination…

Hard copies are in 3-ring binders: one binder for main dishes (sorted by protein), one binder for sides, apps, soups, salads, vegetables, and a third binder for desserts (sorted by type: cake, pie, cookies, etc.).

For electronic recipes, I use Recipe Keeper. It was a one-time cost (currently $13 for iOS), and I’ve been very happy with it. It is fully customizable for courses and categories, and searchable for keywords or ingredients - it can be as organized as you want it to be. I can type in a recipe, or import recipes from websites, or even from photos. See screenshot.

I don’t have an EYB membership, so I rely on memory for what recipes are in what cookbook.

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I tend to search for various recipes when first making a given dish, and mish-mash together elements of those recipes that look best.

For a long time I thought I’d remember my mish-mash and could re-create from that my family’s favorites. Then I found that my memory wasn’t so good as I’d remembered. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Now, I tend to save my favorites in Word doc form, retaining the 5 or 7 basic recipes I used as inspiration, but weeding out (and in, plus other stuff) the things that I liked/didn’t like from each of them.

So, eventually I’ve got a few hundred Word docs with recipes that I think are OKAY to repeat.

Plus another hundred or so that are committed to memory that won’t be written down, unless I get really bored, or unless one of my daughters convinces me to write down.

Does that use your Google storage? I have to delete things every day to stay under my limit. Too much mail and photos.

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I’ve just hit my 15gb limit at gmail… Had to buy monthly cloud storage, I believe it’s 1 or 2 euro a month. And then I also buy apple cloud storage for my iphone and ipad.

By the way, I use a phone app called organizeat. I believe it’s 12 euro a year. It works well enough for me.

As much as any other all-text email, yes. Very small. I pay for storage. Life is too short.

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Lots of ideas here. I think to get my recipes a little more organized I’m going to put the ones already printed in a 3-ring binder with dividers. I realized how much nostalgia I have tied to all the splats and notes I’ve made on the recipes from making them so many times.

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Hard copies of keeper recipes go in 3 ring binders, sorted. Electronic copies of those print-outs, similarly sorted, are kept in an Excel file on the desk-top computer. There is a back up of the desk-top computer in the cloud.

Once a year I go through the binders and pull anything which I haven’t much thought about making in a while, or I no longer deem worthy of the space. I also delete those files from the Excel version. This does a little, but not much, to keep things in check. The collection keeps growing. Last year I sorted two overflowing binders into four which are slightly more organized.

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I use Obsidian MD, which is a note-taking app. Each recipe is just a text file, and I order them into folders and add tags for cooking method/cuisine/etc., make links between recipes and ingredients, and with Obsidian I can use a search feature and see a map of links.

Pros: Future-proof (if Obsidian closes up shop, I still have the text files), easy if you feel comfortable with using markdown for formatting, free (-ish: you can pay to get access on your mobile devices, if you want that)

Cons: You can store files in the cloud, but I don’t, so computer backups are important (for other things too, though)

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