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This isn't so techie, but I've started to print out recipes or rip them out of magazines and put them in clear presentation binders like these:
http://www.samflaxny.com/browse.cfm/4,1509.htm

Then I can take them wherever and because they're covered in a plastic sleeve, they never get too dirty!

Try BigOven. it's bigoven.com (I don't know how to do the hyperlink thing). Shopping lists, trading recipe cards with friends, scale up/down your recipes depending on need, nutritional information, HUGE online database that you can download, etc.

Gwen - My method is certainly not the savviest but works for me (I'm also a mac user)...I simply save recipes to pdf incorporating the main ingredient into the file name (so they are searchable via sherlock). I then save to one of many folders I have set up for recipes broken down by category; i.e. Recipes - appetizers, Recipes - soups, etc.

This method works well for me, but then again - I just got a new macbook and am working with a new clean hard drive as opposed to my chaotic, mess old iBook. This method might be cumbersome for reorganizing lots of existing recipes.

i have the same problem! i was thinking of starting a gmail account for my recipes...i'm going to go do it now!

I use Sidenote (link in my name) to copy, paste, save, and print text from everything (mostly recipes) on my Mac. Then I print out the recipes and put them in plastic sleeves and in a binder. But the text is still on the computer in case I need to re-print it or send it to someone else.

I use YUM. It's free, pretty easy to use, and best of all, one can usually just drag a selection into the recipe window and Yum will automagically enter the measurements, ingredients, and directions into their respective fields (try a epicurious.com recipe). It's got it's quirks (manually save often!), but it is being updated somewhat frequently, so I expect the bug situation to improve. Again, it's free and works great on OS X.

i use yahoo myweb to bookmark all the ones i come across online, and if i actually print them out to make them, i put them into a binder at home.

I've made a recipe label in gmail so whether I'm e-mailing something from epicurious to my self, or receiving something from someone else they all can be found in my archives with little effort. With gmail, they're all word search able too which does come in handy. I'm pretty scatter brained and get things from a million sources and this method has worked out really well for me.

I copy/paste text into a plain-ole WORD document and save it in a RECIPES fold on my harddrive.
But no more organization beyond that.
And make sure to include the URL.

I use del.icio.us to track recipes and other things. Del.icio.us also lets me link up with other friends and tap into their recipe links too.

tinderbox by eastgate http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

you really can't beat it for recipes or any other sort of notation task that you might have.

I just downloaded Big Oven's free 30-day trial. It seems pretty robust, but so far, it's a teeny bit labor intensive to enter recipes. Up until now I've just copied and pasted recipes into Word and then kept them in a folder called Recipes. Pretty high tech, I know. But sometimes the simple solutions are the best ones.

wow, so many awesome suggestions. here's my question: i use a PC at work (where i do the vast majority of recipe finding) and a mac at home. which program will work great on both?

I use PDA Cookbook Plus from Wakefield Software. The database is on my home PC, but it syncs with my Palm Treo so I can put together a menu and shopping list on the train and pick up the ingredients on the way home. I keep a binder with the paper recipes in sheet protectors for the actual cooking (I'm not keen on exposing my electronics to food splatters), though I have used the Treo to cook at a friends' house.

I use Connoisseur on my Mac--works very well, especially the "cooking view" option.

I use Microsoft's One Note, which came free with my laptop. It's great because you can paste in photos along with the text, and you can make tabs just like in a real cookbook. I'm totally in love with this software for both sorting recipes and blog entries and whatnot. It's brilliant!

I'd put your recipes into a wiki such as pbwiki.com. After trying and eventually abandoning half a dozen desktop recipe databases, I find that the wiki actually works for me, because I can get a recipe into the wiki fast, it's searchable, I can use it from any computer, and it's free.

Cookbook (click my name and check out all the features on the website) looks like a fantastic piece of mac cooking software... unfortunately, they haven't made it yet - it's in development. I can't wait until I get to buy it! For now, I "print" the recipes to PDF, but it is a pain, especially since I love trying recipes from blogs and I can't remember which one I found what on... you know how it goes.

One other online app that I've enjoyed lately is http://GroupRecipes.com

They're as much online social networking as recipe management, but there are certain things about their features (still in beta) that are very appealing.

I do the cheapest and easiest thing with recipes: if I visit a website or see something in the nytimes I copy and paste it into a word file. In my computer's document folder I have a folder for recipes. Easy as could be. no special software involved. I even save menus for big dinners, like thanksgiving, so, for example, I can look up thanksgiving 2004, which includes my shopping list and all the recipes I used.

Thanks for the mention of BigOven, above. Just a quick note on the data entry -- one of the things that BigOven supports is the ability to paste in text files from any format, and then you simply use "Screen Import" to point and click to tell it which text is the title, which text is the ingredients, etc. Once recipes are in the system, you can post them online to our shared archive, get nutrition facts for them, drag and drop them onto a shopping list or meal calendar, and more. More information and a free trial at http://www.bigoven.com.

Thanks to everyone for the great suggestions! There are quite a few programs that sound promising, so I'll see which works out best for me.

I don't see any recommendations yet for Mastercook. It's a venerable program -- I've been using various incarnations of it since 1994! It's now on version 9, and has an interface to IE for cut and paste web importing, supports pictures (also cut and paste, if you wish), has shopping lists, a PDA program (included) -- I think it does it all.

Click my name for the link.

I'm late in posting a comment here but just want to add that I use MacGourmet and I'm happy with it. It has separate fields for ingredients and directions for each recipe and that's a little fussy for my tastes, so I copy-and-paste entire recipes into the "directions" field and then I search by directions (or recipe name) if I need to find something. I use a PC at work so I use del.icio.us too; I save recipes to del.icio.us at work and paste them into MacGourmet when I get home.

I also use Connoisseur and think it is really great. The interface is really great - it is designed to look and work a lot like iTunes, so it is really intuative. It may be Mac-only, however.

I picked it by putting "recipes" into Version Tracker and trying a few different free and trial options. There are a ton on there, so I suggest just playing around until you find the one that makes the most sense for you.