I was just reading Heather's post on Lavender Blue about how she organises and culls her cook book collection. I'm always interested in how other people organise things....probably because I'm not very organised myself! Anyway, I thought I would just jot down a few notes about how I cope with my ever expanding recipe collection....hope Heather doesn't mind me stealing her idea!
My cookbook collection is not very huge, but I do have quite a few, however, at the moment most of them are in a box in a storage unit, while I try and decorate and renovate my house, so I seem to be collecting new ones, and a huuuuge pile of recipes printed from the recipe sites that I visit. Mostly the BBC Good Food and Food.com sites but also from the various inspirational blog writers that I frequent. Oh, and magazines too! I quite like Easy Cook for simple quick ideas.
So what I do is this....
I have an ancient laptop that someone was going to throw away, and I use it for my recipes. I only have a desktop pc, so the laptop is easy to take out into the kitchen. I don't have a special programme, I just use Word.
If the recipe is printed off the internet, and doesn't have a particularly helpful picture I type them into a word document, and save them, organised into folders for different course, and sometimes even within that folder into other headings, like low carb, or vegetarian. If it's a recipe from a magazine, then I will scan it and save the scan.
I'm slowly reducing the pile of "tried and liked" recipes that I had accumulated, and keeping up with the new ones. I still have a pile of magazines, but they should gradually dwindle as I go through them and decide there's nothing else in there I want to try...although I guess I could scan the ones I might like to do and save them too! The only drawback with scanning them is that I can do a find in Word for a particular ingredient that I might have and want to use, but obviously that doesn't work with scanned items, as they are basically a photo.
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