In our vintage 1950 Betty Crocker cookbook there are quite a few newspaper clippings, left there by the original owner. They range from recipes for macaroni and cheese to a very tempting lemon meringue pie.
It got us wondering - do you clip recipes? Do you cut them out of magazines and newspapers, or do you stick mostly to cookbooks and recipes online? Will your favorite cookbooks hold yellowed scraps of newspaper for someone to find twenty years from now?
I have an oversized envelope filled with clippings- when I try one and it's good, I copy the recipe onto a note card that goes in the photo album I use as a cookbook. Recipes that need *something* go in another envelope for tinkering later, and recipes that seem fully irredeemable go in the trash. It's a decent system- if I didn't have it, I'd be eaten by scraps of the food sections of the Times and our two local papers.
sign of the times--i have a "recipes" bookmark on my web browser. :)
i just started a recipe collage book.
any recipe that looks delicious and do-able, i clip (or print!) and i clip the pretty picture that accompanies it. then i acrylic-medium it into a wire sketchbook. It's very loosely organized, like "casseroles," "appetizers," "asian fusion," etc. and eventually i will make a table of contents.
but so far, i am so busy making it i don't have time to try the recipes.
One my treasures from my grandmother was her Betty Crocker cook book. Not that she was a good ccok, but I loved her comments in the margins and the plans for the poker parties! I am a clipper, but I put them in a note book. I start clipping from some of my cookbooks, just keep what I like and recycle the rest.
I am in awe of all of you who are so organized. I don't yet have a system, as I have recipes everywhere - bookmarked in books, in unsorted folders in my computer, in magazines, clippings inserted into plastic clear books etc. I'm looking for a way to organize them and haven't had the time nor the inspiration to date. I don't want to ruin my magazines by tearing them out, but I find it sometimes difficult to leaf through all of them, wading through the articles and ads to look for the recipe I need.
I clip and print out from internet. I don't try to keep recipes on the computer, just doesn't work for me.
I keep them in a wooden paint box (with hinges, lid, handle, clasps to close it). I have no idea why, that's just where I have kept them for years. It stands on the floor in the kitchen. They aren't in any order but I can always find what I want.
Every 5 years or so I go through and clear out recipes that make me wonder what I was thinking when I clipped them. But some of these I have made over and over. A few years ago I took out the recipes I always make around Christmas and put them in a separate notebook and that has actually worked out pretty well as I never make them any other time (special cookies and cakes, spiced nuts, etc.)
I've also got a disorganized recipe collection, both clipped from magazines or newspapers and printed from the internet. They sit piled up in a folder, with the most recently used recipe on top. I should really go through it to weed out the ones I'll never use again. Filing them into a binder might be an idea too....
i have a notebook- full of my own recipes, printed out recipes from friends, the net, and other cookbooks. they are first separated into tried and untried, and then the tried ones are grouped by category (i made a table of contents a few months back, with spaces in it so that I could pencil in more recipes)
now that I've started reading blogs, my notebook is filling up; and i should probably weed out recipes that have been in there for 10 years; but it's only one notebook
uh oh super guilty confession and timely too. i'm doing the cure and the kitchen portion is this week. i took a look around and realized that my recipe book (made from a photo album) is now a three foot pile which includes all the food sections from ny & la from the last few years. going thru them -- and putting the recipes i use on my computer -- is part of my spring project. anyone know a good recipe program for mac?
I do both, I have recipes in binders in those plastic page protectors from magazines, and a bookmark folder of recipes, and I used to have a bunch saved on my computer too until I lost them when the hard drive died. I also save some when I think of it to my recipe book on allrecipes.com
Abby,
Can't help you on mac recipe programs, but thought I'd repeat a clippings storage tip that various AT people have been passing around:
- scan the recipes
- sort files onto different flash drives by theme (ingredients, occasions, etc)
- label drives or put into boxes with labels
How cool would it be to have a spice jar full of flash drives containing recipes?