Managing Recipes

Granny

New member
This Tutorials Forum says "Net Cooking Talk Members offer up tutorials on what they are best at." Well, I certainly don't claim to be best at managing recipes, and I wouldn't call this a tutorial but I didn't know where else to post it.

At first it was fun leafing through my small stack of recipes and cookbooks, but somehow over time that small stack turned into Mount Vesuvius. I would spend hours searching through all that for a single recipe that I remembered seeing 'somewhere in the stack'. The recipes I loved became the recipes I loved to hate.

The only way I could think of to solve the problem was to buy two notebooks and some plastic sleeves. I made a cookbook of the recipes I had tried that were good, and a notebook of recipes I wanted to try in the future. After all was said and done, the recipes on newspaper clippings and such ended up in the trash, and the recipe leaflets and cookbooks went to the second hand store where they most likely ended up in someone else's Mount Vesuvius.

This involved some time and a lot of typing, but in the end it was well worth it and there weren't nearly as many recipes that I kept as I thought there would be. That is because I set some rules for myself.

In the cookbook, I only allowed one recipe for each item. ie one meatloaf recipe, one pancake recipe, etc. That is because I only need the best one.

If any recipe in my cookbook is good, but not great, I keep looking and trying new recipes until I can replace it with the one that I consider to be as good as it can get.

I knew the 'to try' recipes could become a Mount Vesuvius of it's own, so when determining whether or not to keep a recipe to try, if I knew in my heart that I would never try it, or if I thought it wouldn't be as good as my current cookbook recipe for that item, I didn't keep that recipe.

I would go through my 'to try' recipe notebook every month or two. I have found that as time goes by I will look at many of those recipes and think 'Why did I ever think I would want to try this?' When that happens, I get rid of that recipe. I was very surprised to see how many 'to try' recipes I eliminated that way -- with no regrets.

Every couple of weeks I would pick 2 or 3 'to try' recipes and force myself to make them 'today and/or tomorrow' -- no excuses.

Currently there are only 2 recipes in the 'to try' notebook and they came from this site, but I have only just begun to check out the recipes here.

How do the rest of you manage your recipes?
 
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luvs

'lil Chef
Gold Site Supporter
i most often store stuff in my mind. i've got many a cookbook, although, prefer to read 'em, then kind of tweak stuff to my own liking, as i was taught by my Pap & my Dad- cannot remember that last time i looked at one.
 

Granny

New member
That's the way my grandmother cooked... from her mind. She may have never even owned a cookbook. If you asked her for a recipe for something, she'd say things like "a dab of shortening" and "a couple handfuls of flour". A pinch of this and a pinch of that.

She was a great cook.
 

chilefarmer

New member
All my recipes are on my computer. One folder (recipes) has folders for different items, meat, rice, sweets and bread (excreta). with many sub folders in each. CF
 

Saliha

Well-known member
Its nice if you have great recipes in your mind but then need to share them on time with someone. We might get memory problems and forget all nice recipes.

:sad:

I am old-fashion and like cooking books and my own notes and recipes I collect to the folders. Some I store some the best recipes to forums (to their cooking sections).

:wink:
 
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Doc

Administrator
Staff member
Gold Site Supporter
Great idea Granny!!!!!!! I like it. I'll mention it to DW and see what she thinks.

Chilefarmer ...I suspect you already back your recipes and important stuff up to a removable hard drive or CD ....but if there are any who do not regularly back up learn from others who have lost years worth of recipes and photos and important stuff all to a hard drive crash. Oh the aggravation. Make backup copies of your data and save yourself a lot of grief. It is not a question of if a hard drive will fail, but a question of when. They all fail eventually.
 

ChowderMan

Pizza Chef
Super Site Supporter
I keep mine in plain ole text files - easy to edit/add notes - many utility programs that can search files for specific words/phrases, etc

seen too many software apps go belly up leaving people high and dry to trust any of them.

we try to do a rough weekly menu plan - helps with the "no left overs" philosophy.

and I have a page with favorite dishes in boxes - meats / pasta / vegetarian / fish / etc to jog ye olde memory when making up a plan.
 

Granny

New member
Besides having the recipes on my computer in a pdf file, I have the pdf file backed up on a flash drive, plus I have the printed cookbook. Might be overkill, but there are people who say it isn't a matter of 'if', but 'when' someone or some country takes down the U.S. power grid. I'm probably being over-cautious, but I figure better safe than sorry.
 

luvs

'lil Chef
Gold Site Supporter
That's the way my grandmother cooked... from her mind. She may have never even owned a cookbook. If you asked her for a recipe for something, she'd say things like "a dab of shortening" and "a couple handfuls of flour". A pinch of this and a pinch of that.

She was a great cook.

'smidgeons', 'dabs', 'a tad of that' & 'sprinkle of' were often used in my family, too. i've many cases of notebooks, too- fergot to type that- many have many recipes/thoughts i'll jot into 'em.
 

JoeV

Dough Boy
Site Supporter
Almost everything is on the computer, similar to CF's setup, and it resides on my island in the kitchen where it's accessible all the time. This past Christmas I bought 3 flash drives and gave each of the kids all the recipe files as a gift. They thought I had given them gold. In spite of having a 1 terabyte backup drive, I now have three copies of everything in remote locations. I'll have them bring the flash drives here for Christmas, and update them with with new and modified recipes.

I have quite a few tutorials that I made up, but they were all stolen when a previous member of NCT dropped off the planet while working on a NCT cook book. She was the gatherer of data from many of us NCT members, and never returned the gathered data back to Doc when she left in a hissy fit. So much for trust.
 

luvs

'lil Chef
Gold Site Supporter
my flash was great. until that drive broke into two, & i was sans data.
 

lilbopeep

🍀🍀🌹🐰 Still trying to get it right.
Site Supporter
I put my recipes into Microsoft OneNote. I love it. I can highlight a recipe (or whatever article) online and hit send to OneNote and to go into a folder I have set up to receive recipes from online sources and at the bottom of each is the url of the original source. So I can go back and look at the original site, find additional recipes etc without having to guess where I saw/found it.

I also back up onto my desktop computer that has a second hard drive for backups. Plus an external drive I back up to once or twice a year. If a computer crashes just remove the HD and put in a hard drive enclosure. All you need to do then is plug it into usb port and your data (docs, phots, music etc) is accessible.

Andy helped me out when my laptop died some years ago. Since then I have removed hard drives from 2 desktops that died (1 that was from 2001 and the old type of hard drive), place them in enclosures and all my data is still there and safe.

Thank you so much Andy! I am not so afraid of losing my data any more. I know nothing is 100% but this helps.
 

ChowderMan

Pizza Chef
Super Site Supporter
most new machines come with CD & DVD burners - I back up to an external and once a quarter burn the external drive to DVDs then erase the external and start over.

I've heard/seen so many "what's a backup?" horror stories over the years I think I'm slightly paranoid.

I've also experienced the "Track 0 Unreadable" hard drive thing a couple times - backups are then the only copy..... sometimes the hard drive will read (but not boot) in an external enclosure, sometimes they don't....
 

Adillo303

*****
Gold Site Supporter
Love Peeps idea.

I just started to use Dropbox it seems to be working well.

Maybe it's time to drink the "In the cloud" Kool Aid.

I also use on-line backup. The little fairies do it all for me Apollo I sleep.
 

Ian M.

New member
Fallon and I went on a bender a couple of years ago and decided that all the dibbs and dabs of recipes that we'd gathered in a lifetime were now to be coded and filed in separate "cookbooks" of our own making - so Fallon purchased a boatload of various coloured binders and we began typing, clipping and filing. This lasted for about six months! Then we just copied and saved things and the pile of things we copied got higher and higher and then even higher. Now I have a stack of paper sitting on top of a desk in our spare room that could nearly touch the ceiling. Every week or so I say to myself that THIS is the week I'm going to punch holes in all that paper and file it in the proper coloured binder (ie: beef, pork, chicken, pies, cakes, foreign recipes, etc.) and just thinking about doing that makes me so tired that it never gets off the ground! Further, I'd saved recipes from a variety of magazines that we collected and kept in pasteboard boxes - like forever!! Then we moved and those bloody boxes all had to be moved with us! Never again, believe me. My job is to now properly file all the paper in the stacks and Fallon's job is to get out her trusty scissors and clip all the stuff she wants out of those magazines. Then glue the clippings onto more paper for me to punch holes in and put in the proper binders. Sounds daunting, to me!! Will I ever accomplish all that? Well, kids love playing with their little scissors and when Kieran and Niamh get old enough to help out, this job is going to become theirs!! Gotta love that idea.................and from now on, we're taking a page out of CF's book and putting everything further collected on computer with associated hard drive backup!! Just as soon as I learn how to do all of that! It took us since we got here to finally manage to "nearly" get all our computer issues straightened out so that we can successfully post on the sites we like. Found ourselves a wonderful computer guru in the City who has been invaluable!! Now we appear to be in business - and several pounds lighter financially! But it's worth the effort and the money, as well. Let's hope it holds.
 
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