How to Organize Your Recipes - Part 1

Since this blog is about my love of cookbooks, I thought I would share some of my organizational tips and ways to help you keep track of all your recipes.  I love organizing things, making lists, and putting things into order that can be put into order (since so much of life can’t be neatly organized!). 

One of the best ways to index all of your recipes from cookbooks, magazines, and even some blogs is the website “Eat Your Books.”  I have written about how this site works in an earlier post, Eat your books (but not literally!).  Click on that to get all the details.  To briefly explain it, I have entered into this site all of my cookbooks and cooking magazines.  For the books and magazines they have indexed, I can search by a specific dish or ingredient.  It’s a great way to find a recipe for something you know you want to make (as opposed to needing ideas or inspiration about what to cook).  So when I wanted to make zucchini bread with zucchini from a co-worker’s garden, I just type that into the site. It finds all of the recipes for zucchini bread and lists the cookbooks, page numbers, and a list of ingredients (I ended up making the one from “Rose’s Baking Basics”). It does not give you the recipe as you need to own the cookbook to get that.  But this site has been super helpful to organize my cookbooks, search for specific recipes, and keep track of everything.  Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like when you search “zucchini bread” and what the results look like. I can’t recommend this site enough if you have multiple cookbooks like me. 

Something new I’ve done recently is to put a sticky note inside the cover of any cookbook I’ve cooked from and list the recipes and page numbers for what I’ve made. See what I’ve made from “Dinner: Changing the Game” in the pic below.  Then on the page of the actual recipe, I’ll make notes such as if it’s good or not, what I would change if I made it again, and if it’s repeatable or makes good leftovers.  I was starting to forget what I had made so this has been helpful to keep track of what I’ve put time, money, and effort into.  There’s no need to repeat something that wasn’t so good.  And on the reverse, it’s good to repeat recipes that I know I will like.  So if I need inspiration, I can flip open the cover of my cookbook and find something to make quickly.  

Additionally, I also keep a document of new recipes that I’ve made as a different method of looking up recipes I’ve cooked or baked.  This document is searchable so I can look for a recipe name to find the source where it came from.  I only started in November 2020 to keep track of what I made starting with Thanksgiving.  It serves as a record of what I’ve made for different holidays in addition to what I’ve made for every day dinners.  The benefit of this method is that it’s not limited to where the recipe is found.  It can be from a cookbook or a magazine that is not on the Eat Your Books website, a recipe I found on Pinterest, or even a family recipe that’s not electronic.  

Hopefully this gives you a few new ways to keep yourself organized and easily find that recipe to make again and again - and what not to repeat!