Where Did You Get That Recipe? And How Do You Keep Yours Organized?

updated Sep 30, 2020
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(Image credit: Anne Wolfe Postic)

If you are like me, you have recipes written on scraps of paper, loosely filed somewhere near your actual cookbooks. Or maybe you’re more organized. Any way you store them, those recipes are often family favorites. Mine came from a variety of sources and I need to organize them.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

My split pea soup recipe and a delicious slow cooker recipe for peanut butter chicken came from an online parenting community I used to frequent when my now 15-year-old son was a baby. I was a younger than average mother and those ladies knew how to cook!

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

My delicious mushroom and almond pâté came from Ruth, a real life play group mom from the same era. The mushroom and almond spread was a welcome departure from hummus and a great way to use up the mushrooms in my co-op share for the week.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

When I was pregnant with our third child, I had a sudden, uncontrollable craving for a food from my childhood. My best friend’s mom, Betsy, made these delicious little biscuits. Dinner at their house always included them and we were even allowed to drizzle them with honey. (Though I use Betsy’s recipe, I have substituted real butter for the Crisco and it seems to work just fine.) Those biscuits are just perfect.

I have plenty of recipes from my mom, my grandmothers and other friends. Some of them — like the udon noodles with seitan, edamame, broccoli, ginger and garlic my friend Kristen brought us after the birth of our second child — are stored in my head. Admittedly, that’s not the best place to keep them, even worse than on unlabeled pieces of scrap paper. One of these days, I’ll get around to organizing them all. Until then, I’ll have to keep making our favorites, so I don’t forget how!

Where do you get most of your recipes? And how do you organize the ones that don’t come from books?

(Images: Anne Postic)