Warning: long post about organising ahead.
The more I have got into cooking, the more of a mess my array of recipes have become. With my recipes all coming from multiple sources, it was tricky on two counts, one to keep all my ‘to try’ recipes in one place so I can refer to them when deciding what to have for dinner, and two to also to keep all my successful ‘keeper’ in one place to remember which recipes were worth cooking again. I actually had planned to include ‘sorting out my recipes’ on my 25 before 25 list , however I seem to have jumped the gun, having the day off for Melbourne Cup last week provided the perfect lazy day to get started.
After a quick google to see what others had used for their recipe organisation, it seemed like there wasn’t a perfect solution for my needs. My most preferred would have been this option here - hand writing out the keeper recipes in a Moleskine notebook. I feel this has a really personal feel, and I like the idea of being to hand down a hand written notebook if I ever had children. The problem with this though is that my hand writing is atrocious and never consistent, so it wouldn’t turn out to be the beautifully written recipe book I would imagine it to be. So that one was out! I did however like her idea of filing her ‘to try’ recipes in a binder with clear sheets. This is perfect as it can house all sorts of mediums, magazine photo copies, newspaper tear outs and internet print outs. So I settled on using a binder for my ‘to try’ recipes – half of my problem was solved!
The bigger issue was the keeper recipes. For digital storage I have purchased the YummySoup! app for Mac. It has been fantastic to store my keeper recipes – it has an internet import option which can automatically populate recipes from my favourite website Taste, and anything that can’t be automatically populate can easily be added manually. The ability to add keywords into the recipe also makes it a breeze to search for a specific recipe, by cuisine, ingredient or the original source. The only issue with YummySoup! is that digital has it’s limitations – if anything ever happened to my computer, my recipes would be lost. I also missed the tangible element of hard copy recipes – there is just something flicking through your recipes that is much more satisfying to read through. So I needed a way to store my recipes outside of the computer. After much internal debate, I decided to use a binder for my keeper recipes also. It wasn’t the perfect way, but it was the best and most practical way to store them.
Now that I had decided to have both my ‘to try’ and ‘keeper’ recipes in binders I could get started on the actual organising. After a few trips to officeworks and some playing around on the computer, my folders ended up looking a little something like this:
from left to right: my keeper recipes, my to try recipes – and then two folders not a part of this organisation but I bought anyway, one for takeout menus, and another to home all my restaurant business cards.
my keeper recipe file.
the tabs
the actual printed recipes – housed in plastic sleeves (great for cooking spatter)
My tabs are categorised the same for both my ‘to try’ and ‘keeper’ recipes to make it consistent and they are separated as follows:
- Starters/snacks
- Salads
- Soups
- Sides/vegies
- Pasta/risotto
- Curries
- Noodles/stir fry
- Meat
- Fish
- Misc. Savoury
- Desserts
- Cakes
- Biscuits
- Misc. Sweet
Time will tell if these are sufficient for my recipes – but I can also add/remove some as I go. The custom tabs were quite easy to make, I just measured tabs that were supplied with the dividers and created the same size boxes in Word and added my text and colours. You can download a copy of mine if you like them here - Recipe file tags.
But all in all I am quite happy with how it turned out – hopefully it works well so I don’t end up with a pile of mis-matched recipes again.
How do you organise your recipes? What have you found to work for you? Any tips or suggested improvements for my system?
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