Salon post: March 23

[jenett]

Welcome to this week's salon post!

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Topic of the week
I am contemplating revamping how I store recipes (which is to say, something more effective than the tag in Pinboard I have, many of which are entirely too aspirational for my actual cooking time and energy, no matter how tasty they might be.)

So. I'm curious. What works for you when managing recipes? What doesn't? What would you like to try, but haven't gotten around to? (Both in terms of organising such things, and in terms of, y'know, actual recipe recommendations)

What I've been up to:
Just started the Donna season of Doctor Who (I am skipping some episodes at this stage, since I've watched the early seasons of New Who multiple times relatively recently.)


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Comments

[redbird]

I have a folder of "recipes" on my PC, and beyond that do some google cooking.

I'm also still using printed cookbooks—mostly The Joy of Cooking, Fanny Farmer, and Cooking for Two Today (for values of "today" that are in the last century). A week or two ago, adrian_turtle sent me a recipe she'd made and we'd both liked, and I printed it out, used it, and then folded the printout up and tucked it in between two cookbooks.

ETA, in case that term isn't familiar: "google cooking" means I look at what ingredients I have, and then search for something like "chicken green pepper onion -mushroom."

[lexicalcrow]

I actually made a recipe journal based on a tutorial I found on youtube, and I keep my recipes in that. I'm not a very good cook, nor an experienced one, but I put all the recipes in it that I can cook so far. I wanted to take ownership of that, to document what had worked for me, and to begin my own collection of recipes that I know I can make. Which reminds me I need to add in teriyaki chicken, because I cooked that for the first time tonight, and it was a total success ty Adam Liaw. <3

I have one other cookbook that's mine, and it's Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion. It is organised by ingredient, and it honestly could be a kitchen witch's grimoire (it has nearly 800 pages it is a brick omg). My mum originally had one, but my brother took it when he moved out after my mother got a newer edition for a gift, so when I saw this one in a charity shop for $8, I scooped it up. She has a section on equipment, and a section on basics, and honestly, she taught me how to make a roux, so. I am very fond of this book, and I plan to explore it in more depth when I am taking care of myself for a month or so while the parents are interstate. She has some lovely recipes in here I would love to try. I do love that it's organised by ingredient, because I can just skip to what I want, and see what strikes my fancy.

In the kitchen, we have a bunch of other recipe books, and an index card box full of handwritten recipes and folded pieces of paper with recipes that have been printed out from the web and stuck in there for safe-keeping. I think I have a few hiding away in there. The box itself has changed a few times, but the cards haven't. Some are looking a little worse for wear, which indicates the ones we cook the most often.

[alexseanchai]

What works for you when managing recipes?

""managing recipes""

by which I mean I p much don't—either it exists in my email and is findable by searching that, or I have to go google it [again / for the first time] when I want to make it, or it's in a cookbook I own and hopefully there's a sticky note on it but probably there isn't!

I should fix this...

[kaberett]

Recipes: I have a Dreamwidth "to try" tag! Also a tumblr one. >_>

[silveradept]

I don't really have a recipe book or organizational system...because what I feel I really need is a technique book. If I can learn how one cooks things first, I can infinitely recombine them into new and interesting things as I like.

Additionally, a person not appearing in my life had a horde of cookbooks with recipes that were never used. So I may be a bit contrarian in my wanting only cookbooks that I will actively use in my domain.

[auroracloud]

I probably should get organized about mine... I've got a recipe book, and I've written exactly one recipe in it. :-P The only way I organize them is in my head. Which mostly works all right - I've got a good grasp of techniques and what you can combine with what, and when I try out a something new, I learn from that in the sense of "ooh, you can replace meat with quinoa and make delicious quinoa-beetroot patties" and then I'm done learning it, and next time I do it, I just do it from the top of my head. A lot of the time I just make up the food, like "I feel like something with coconut milk and shrimp, let's see what else I could have with it and if it's a pasta or a wok or what". Works out better with cooking than with baking, but I rarely bake these days. And most of my baking recipes are in my existing cookbooks, or variations of things in them.

But sometimes I don't quite remember how I did what, and unless it's in a book I own or on my computer (where I've occasionally collected recipes from my mom), I'll just try to remember how I googled it, or whether it's in a magazine cutting or something... Sometimes I bookmark things I find online. I should do that more regularly.

[wohali]

A few years ago, I started keeping a short-list of recipes I love to make, around 100. The list is a simple text file (written in Markdown) with references to the cookbook, physical binder/folder, or website where the recipe is. I rotate recipes in and out of the list from time to time.

Before grocery shopping, I actually take out gamers' dice and roll them to decide what I'm going to make that week. A couple of re-rolls are allowed. (I still kinda-sorta have plans to actually publish a cookbook with this technique someday, bundled with some dice. Why not? It's a gimmick that's fun for the whole family.)

As for organizing beyond that: 1. I keep my store-bought cookbook shelf small and thematic, so I can glance and make specific choices. 2. I keep my digital recipes in a folder and use "grep" to search through them for keywords like specific ingredients or names or places. It's low-tech, but it requires no fancy software and is thus future-proof. 3. Family recipes are still in dead-tree form because of magic thinking about protecting them from digital pirates or something. My most valued recipes get printed out, 3 hole punched, and added to the binder. The order is chronological (in the order in which I was exposed to them) because that makes the most sense to me.

Oh, an important note: If I make a recipe from online somewhere more than once, I save a copy locally, and sometimes print it out, too. I've been caught off guard by losing a favourite recipe from online often enough that I don't trust them to be there in perpetuum anymore. That's why I never settled on Pinboard or the like.

[rosefox]

We use subtlehouse as a recipe book, and I have a recipe index on our intranet, with colored tagging for aspects that are relevant to us (can I make it when my arms hurt, will the household's picky eater eat it, is it veg*n, etc.). I took a screenshot of the index, since it's easier to show it than describe it.

Some of the links go to recipes on my personal journal (which are aggressively tagged, e.g., food.cooking.stew.beef barley), some to recipes on subtlehouse (which has a much less useful tagging system and I need to entirely overhaul it at some point), and some to web links (but I mostly copy recipes into my journal, with source links, so I can note modifications). It works pretty well.

[ashareem]

We've a large number of cookbooks around here. My fallback/goto has always been the Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook, originally published in the 1950s. It's the one I grew up with, literally; my copy was my mother's. We've bought copies of the 1st edition for all three kids.I like it because it gives actual instructions on preparing food, rather than "open a can of ..."
For personal recipes, I tend to keep mine in Pepperplate, which is both a website and an app.

[haptalaon]

I'm moving my recipes over to index cards. I'm moving my EVERYTHING over to index cards. I've discovered they are the key to mastering every task my ADHD makes chaotic.

For a while, I had a notebook of ingredients. Each page was the ingredients of a thing I knew how to cook, and cooked regularly - so it was easy to take to the shops and just get the things.

The other thing is, how recipes are physicalyl laid out on the page. I wish more cook books would divide ingredients by "type". So for example, "Key ingredients", "Seasonings", "Stuff for the cooking process", just making it easier to assess the information and make substitutions.