As I try to become more efficient at teaching myself to cook, shop locally, use fresh organic produce and cook handmade meals, I am searching for all the tools I need to make it a little easier. I am currently looking for the best way to store my ever growing recipe collection. I don’t think the index cards my Mom used will work for me… too many print outs from the internet and magazine pages. But I will explore and see what solutions I come up with. If you have any great ideas, please post them to our Flickr Group account or leave a comment.
Check out the rest of our recipe storage photographs here! I like the beach bag filled with folders. I might try that.
I wrote my own MS Access database to store my favorite recipes. Over the years it's become too difficult to remember which book or magazine had the 'best' version of a recipe, so as I find one I love, I transcribe it into the database. I have custom reports set up to print recipe cards or sheets. I can give copies to friends, and store one copy of each in a recipe binder in the kitchen. If I lose a recipe in the kitchen, or spill something on it, I can always reprint it!
Don't store on the computer. Computers break down or totally crash. Just get a nice A4 size clip folder, and file everything there. You can get dividers to have categories that suit you. It is much easier to have a folder that you can take into the kitchen, than keep running to the computer all the time. Folders allow you to store pages torn out of magazines and prints out from the online cooking websites. I use that and it serves me well. All you have to do is to clean it out once a year. Throw out what you don't use or don't like. In reality, we only use a very limited number of recipes, the rest is kept for 'just in case'.
All the best Kathryn
I think storing them on a computer is fine as long as you back up your files, which you should do regardless. There are also services that allow you to store your files on their servers as well.
Thank you everyone for your suggestions!
I store my recipes on the computer program Cook'n, then I print them out and store them in page protectors in a Binder. Really love the program here is a link.
http://www.dvo.com/gcookn.html?CID=G_cookn&gclid=COS8ruT9qaICFR5Ogwod1W2OQA