Keeping Track of Recipes

I realise that by showing you my methods for keeping track of recipes I might be exposing myself in all my control freak glory, not to mention a fair bit of geekiness. But you already knew that, right?

I have to confess I am a compulsive recipe collector. I love reading cookbooks, food magazines and food blogs. But I have real trouble keeping track of recipes I’d like to try. When it comes to actually cooking the meal I often find myself rifling through scraps of paper, magazines, books, and web bookmarks to find that recipe I’m thinking of.

When we moved to Mexico we didn’t move our furniture or household gear but we did send some boxes of clothes, toys and a few books. There’s no way I could have brought all my cookbooks so I needed a way to take my recipes with me, particularly since I knew I wouldn’t have access to English language cookbooks. So I set myself the task of going through all my cookbooks and scanning the recipes I wanted to take. Let me tell you, it was a MAMMOTH task! But at the end I had my entire recipe collection on my computer.

All I had to do now, was get it into some sort of order. Being a bit anal about these things and wanting the recipes to be easy to find and looking pretty (of course!) I spent a fair bit of time cropping and tidying up each image and decided to use Microsoft Publisher to arrange the recipes because it was a program I already had and have used a lot. There’s probably many other programs that could be used as well, but Publisher worked well for me because there’s lots of options for dragging images around, rotating, and resizing within a page.

The result is my own personalised cookbook, with recipes organised by course and by main ingredient within the course (for example all the minces recipes are together within the Beef section, all the chicken breast recipes are separate from the drumstick ones)

I know, am I a geek, or what?

Once the pages were all finished and printed, I made up contents pages and indexes and put them into books of plastic sleeves. There were so many pages I filled 4 books. Told you I was a compulsive recipe collector! I also left a few sleeves free at the end of each book for new recipes I have collected.

To finish it off, I made cover pages for each volume and put a copy of my conversion sheet in each one.

I think my recipe collection will always be a work in progress. I’m always looking for ways to keep track of my recipes. While we’ve been here, away from all my cookbooks, having all my favourite recipes collected and nicely presented has been great. I should keep it up when I get home, because now that the big, initial job has been done, it won’t be too hard to maintain.

At times, I’ve thought about creating an Access database for my recipes, but that would involve typing them all, so I’ve shied away from that. I’ve checked out a few recipe software packages too, although I’ve yet to see one that did everything I wanted. One of the reasons for starting this blog was to build up a repository of recipes which are categorised, and easily searchable, so one day, perhaps this will be my database.

Of course, this doesn’t include all the family recipes I have collected from my Mum and Grandmother. My project about 5 years ago was to type all them up and make a family cookbook, but its time to update that one and I’ve got a few ideas for that too. A tale for another post, methinks.

How do you keep your recipes organised? Is anyone out there as compulsive/anal/geeky about collecting and organising your recipes??