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Both of my Southern grandmothers were awful cooks. So is my mother, although my father isn't bad -- he was a cook in the Coast Guard and learned a lot. My point is this: my family has no kitchen notebooks or family recipes, because cooking was considered a necessary evil, not a pleasure or skill to be passed down to future generations.

What I've learned about cooking has come from watching the Food Network and reading cookbooks.

A couple of different ways: (1) I have two magazine holders full of notes, printed recipes, etc. The first is a filing of all my goto recipes. For instance, my thanksgiving recipes are all printed off together and clipped and in the magazine holders. So rather than filtering through all my veggie recipes, then my meat ones, then my bread to find all the different ones I make each year, they are all together. Same with my goto appetizers, printed off together and clipped. I like to add 1 or 2 new recipes, but for the most part, 80% of what I make for any given party is something I make often and know is good and will work.
The second has all my clipped recipes or sheets from people that I want to try.
I also use Google Notebook to clip items I find online, rather than printing them out.

If something has passed all the tests and is a definitely keeper, it gets written down on a card and filed in my recipe box.
I also started a blog to keep my recipes in an easy place to share. I never had my recipes with me when I'd travel to visit family, so I figure this will make it easier long term.

I have an old-fashioned photo album with 3-ring sticky pages where I put all of my clippings from magazines and printed recipes from online.

My grandmother was an amazing cook, and she kept all of her recipes in a few recipe boxes, all overfilled and completely disorganized. They had both newspaper and magazine clippings and family recipes written out by hand. When she passed away, I took the boxes, typed out all of the recipes I knew she used, and had them printed and bound to give to all of the women in the family. Of course, if you didn't cook with her, you might not know which recipe is which--many have no titles, only vague quantity suggestions, or no directions at all, just a list of ingredients. Every time I make one of these recipes, I remember the many hours I spent with her in her tiny kitchen, and her arthritic fingers covered in dough or olive oil working alongside mine.

I have a database of recipes so that they're searchable by ingredient and so I can collect recipes I might like to try without adding to my substantial paper clutter.

I love handwritten notes, though, so when I actually cook a recipe I print it out. If I think I'll make it again, I'll write down some notes on the printout (tweaks I'd make, side dishes, and of course the date) and add it to my 3-ring recipe binder. If I won't make it again, the printout gets recycled.

Flipping through that binder has turned into a rather fun experience, as I find recipes I'd forgotten about, with notes from several years ago about who I made it for and how it was received. I can only imagine how fun it will be to hand them down someday.

I have 2 of my mom's cookbooks, circa 1950's, and they are prized possessions. I remember them as a staple in her kitchen...not so much for their content (although the Joy of Cooking is helpful) but for the piles of handwritten family recipes and notes stuffed inside.

When my brother got married last year, I collected the best recipes, typed them out, and put them together with old pics and copies of the hand-written notes in an album. A perfect wedding gift!

my favorite cookbook annotation is in our family Joy of Cooking, in my father's handwriting, a relic of an early, famously stubborn brush with baking. the yield for the peanut butter cookie recipe (something like "makes 3 dozen") has been crossed out and replaced with "about 19".

I scan everything into the computer and eventually I'm going to make a cookbook out of it. Unfortunately my grandparents and parents haven't really kept a notebook and only a few recipes have been passed on so I scanned those as well and I'm trying to collect recipes from the rest of the family so that I can pass something on. For Christmas we went on Epicurious and bought a cookbook made from our own recipes and some from the web for my fiance's sister and she loved it.

We have a few of my grandmother's recipe cards. She was quite a baker. Forty years later, so am I. I tried making date nut bread using her recipe. It didn't taste anywhere near as good. So, Grandma either had a magic touch or she left something out of the written version so that no one could ever make it the same way she did.

Love her dearly, but I wouldn't put it beyond her to have done the latter. What can I say? I've never put my secret ingredient in my chocolate chip cookie recipe down in writing, either.

I am an old cookbook junkie. I been going thru clearing some out. I have look to cook since I was 16 years old. I am now addicted to food blogs. They are the greastest. I love food today, so many spices, different types of breads ect. There so many good recipes on line to try . My Mother also cook , only because it was expected of her (1950) and was not very experimental. I guess its amazing that I developed interest in in. The girls (in their 30's) I work with, can not be bothered to cook. They get fast food.Its too much bother. I feel they and their families are missing out on great food and family time together.

My mother has handwritten recipes from her mother and grandmother stashed away in the front of her cookbooks. I have photocopies of them for now, and they are like my little treasures.
When I got married, as part of a welcoming, all the women on my husband's side put together a cookbook of the family recipes. Its in a large photo album with tons of recipe cards, how to pick out fruits and vegetable, tips and tricks, and virtually anything else that comes to mind cooking related. It was an awesome gift and I almost cried when I saw it, I loved it. Now I can make my husband all the foods he had growing up, its perfect.