I am looking for suggestion on some software/or online program to help me organize all my recipes. (It is a mess of handwritten/cut out from magizine papers). I would like something easy to use, that I can print if need be or share, free would be great but I am willing to buy software. I would love to get it organized enough to create a cookbook for my kids of all the family recipes.
Thanks.
I'm old school. Which is funny when you realize I'm one of the "young" ones on here. :) I use index cards. If I need a visual I just grab the one I need and pop it on the fridge with a magnet. Right now I'm working on a small notebook for recipes I'd like to try. If it's a keeper it will get added to the indexes.
I have done tedious work of putting them in to Microsoft, the paying my teenage son to do it. Printing them out and putting them in a three ring binder.
Now I have an iPad. I either take a screen shot of something on the web or take a picture of what I like in a magazine or a scrap of paper I have scribbled the recipe on. Then I organize the pics in to a separate album on the iPad. I use the iPad in the kitchen all the time. If the recipe doesn't work for me I just delete it.
When I am at the library, I look through the magazines and take a pic with my phone of anything that catches my eye and email it to myself to put it in my iPad.
I keep the original recipes that are hand written by many of my loved ones, but quiet a few of those don't work for health reasons anymore. They are just good memories.
We just print to PDF and put it in a folder.
Ive been looking at a simple device shaped as a bar that attaches to the computer, that scans and files, for organizing receipts. I think it would also work for recipes. It's priced around $200. I've seen it at electronic stores. This gives me another reason to buy it. Smile
I just use All Recipes.com
You use to be able to do cookbooks with them but I think that went away at some point a few years ago.
You can use it free - there's a pay for it premium membership if you want it - but I have everything I want without it.
I used to rip mine out of magazines and put them in a folder. Then when technology came along, I printed them off and punched holes and kept them in a 3 ring binder. THEN I started to just copy and paste them into a Word Document. Then my laptop crashed and I lost all of them. Grrrr. So now, in fact this minute I'm updating it...I have a blog that I post them to. I take pics while I cook and if everyone likes it, it makes the blog. I figure when the kids grow up they will have it with all the family recipes and I put little comments in about each of them for fun memories. The website is free and easy enough to use without having to be all fancy is tech savvy, which I'm not. Here it is if you want to get an idea: http://faithfulcooking.blogspot.com I hope you find something that works for you! Good luck
I do a hybrid of a 3-ring binder, Cozi, and pinterest. If I see something interesting I'll either pin it or add it to my Cozi recipe box. The ones that make it to Cozi tend to be meal ideas that I'm pretty sure my family will like, while pinterest is usually holiday or special event stuff or just something cool I want to think about later. Once I'm sure I'll make a recipe I'll send it to Cozi so that I can send the ingredients to my shopping list and access it from my phone at the store, and later I can add it to my meal plan. If I try a recipe once or twice and it's a winner, then I'll go through the bother of printing it and putting it in my binder.
You can type your existing recipes into Cozi and print them from there.
I have been using evernote for my one stop shop for everything. I love EN for my recipe because I can add additional notes to the original recipe in order to try it different ways.
Why not just use Micosoft Word? Put the ingredients first, with a border around them. Then the cooking directions in a bulleted list. Easy-peasy. You could save each recipe with the name of the dish as it's title, then store them all in the same folder. It will automatically alphabetize them for you, and you can search for a specific recipe.
Lol Jaelyn... I use index cards too.
I have a 3 ring binder that I bought years ago. It has dividers (meat, sides, desserts, etc.) and when I come across a recipe I want to keep I simply print it out and put it in the binder. If I'm saving a recipe from a magazine I copy it and add the copy (magazine paper is too flimsy.) The binder has a clear pocket sleeve on the front and back so I decorated it with photos of my kids in the kitchen over the years, so cute and easy!
And anything you want to save and share in your computer could just be scanned, right? Just keep a word/document file called "recipes" and store them in there.
