If you’re like me, your recipes are a jumbled assortment of clippings and cards, pages printed out from your computer and others ripped from magazines. For a couple of years, now, I’ve been trying to devolop a system that would get a handle on all that paper clutter, and make it easy for me to find my recipes. So I started by buying really pretty three-ring binders, but punching holes in all my recipes was just too impractical for a haphazard person like myself. So I moved on to accordion files, but it was hard to flip through your recipes that way, and stuffing them all in got messy pretty quickly. So I had to get tough with myself and admit that there was no reason, with a steady stream of new recipes coming in almost daily via tv, the internet, and the cookbooks and magazines I love to accumulate, that I should hold on to hundreds of recipes I’ve yet to try. I am going to keep just the must-try ones, and toss all the rest. I also realized that there is no way that I could find a reasonable, practical sorting system for every single recipe I was holding on to, including the ones I have never tried. So I’ve decided to be much more selective about the recipes I tear out, stash them in that accordion file, and then only add them to my official recipe system after I’ve tried them and loved them. In other words, it’s not really my recipe until I’ve actually made it. I am also hoping that this will help me develop something that has eluded me so far – a collection of tried-and-true, go-to recipes I can turn to time and again. I seem to be making new things all the time, and I haven’t really developed a repertoire of favorites. Not many of them, anyway.
As I see it, there are two ways to organize your recipes: the old fashioned way (recipe cards) and the modern way (on your computer). I used to store recipes in folders on my hard drive, but it was inconvenient and awkward to sort through them. And then I discovered Living Cookbook. This very reasonably priced softward (it’s about $35) allows you to organize all of your recipes on your computer. You can create the folders that you want, sort them how you want to sort them, search by ingredient or category, and it even calculates nutrition information based on the ingredients and serving size! It’s amazing and so simple to use, although entering in a new recipe does take a few minutes (the longest recipe I had took 5 minutes).
If you are one of those people who need a tangible, physical way to store your recipes (and there are advantages to both systems), nothing beats the recipe card, whether you print them out or jot them down the old fashioned way. And fortunately, there are as many adorable boxes to stash them in as there are recipes to store. I think this one is sleek and stylish, from Crate and Barrel, and I like the card holder feature at the top.
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