Growing up, this is how my mother collected recipes. She’d write them on 3×5 cards and keep them in a recipe file box. She also had a variety of cookbooks, although her mainstay was The Joy of Cooking.
I have that same system, although I find that it’s where I’m most likely to keep family recipes–making pretty much any recipe file box much too large. Here’s how I store recipes (as you may guess, “Where is the recipe?” is often my first question in cooking):
- The aforementioned file box
- Ring binder of 4×6 recipe cards (my mother sent me off to grad school with this, and since it’s in her handwriting I will keep it forever–although I will always wonder why she included the recipe for escabeche when she knew I hated it)
- Ridiculous number of cookbooks
- File of Word documents on the computer
- Delicious.com–which in spite of its name is not actually a cooking site–with a specific tag
- My “recipe box” on Allrecipes.com
In fact, Allrecipes.com is where I’m most likely to go for new recipes. I know a lot of people use Pinterest, and I have a board with pictures of food, but I’ve never cooked from any of those recipes.
So how do you organize recipes? And why do I have so many cookbooks I never use?
Photo by pirate johnny, via Flickr.