Digital Recipe Organization

by Jess M

Now that the digital age is upon us (cue: Conan O’Brien’s “In the year two-thousaaaaaand...” anyone?) I have moved my recipe organization away from a giant binder and little scraps of magazine cut-outs to an almost all-digital collection. I save them in Google Docs, which is now called Google Drive.

When I find an online recipe that I want to save, I click on the “Printer friendly” link, since it usually brings up the recipe in a nice, neat new page without all the extraneous sidebars and stuff that websites have. Then I “Select All,” copy it, and paste it into a new Google Drive document.

One of the things that I like about using Google Drive is that I can search for an ingredient or other key word and it will pull up any recipes that contain that word, not just those with that word in the title. The other thing I like about it is that I can pull the recipe up on my iPad, set it up on my kitchen counter and read it as I cook. It also makes it easy to share recipes with my husband as we both can contribute and search our “recipes” folder. 

Do not put your iPad this close to the stove. I'm not actually cooking anything here. 

Have you switched to digital recipes? How do you organize them?

(You can also look back and see how Natalie and Carrie have talked about the way they organize their online recipes)

Comments

[Christy M]

I use evernote, because I can take a photo of a recipe in a magazine with my phone and add it to evernote. You can probably do that with Drive too, but I haven't tried it. You can also clip recipes online through a Google Chrome Evernote browser extension.

[Tracy]

I use ziplist, since I find the overwhelming majority of my recipes online anyway. You can copy recipes from any website into it, and although by default it just takes the list of ingredients and a line or two of the instructions, I just copy the instructions into the notes field so that I don't have to go back to each website all the time. You can tag them however you want (some of my faves - pizza, side dish, casserole, beef, chicken, dessert, chocolate, etc). You can search by tag, combine tags together, or just search for a word and it will search titles and ingredients. The best part? Pick the meals you want to cook, add them to a shopping list, and it will make a list of what I need to buy at the store. Download the Ziplist app to your phone - shopping has never been more simple for me. Now I'm hoping to slowly go through my old recipe binder and add in those recipes.

[Jess M.]

Ooh! Thanks for the Ziplist recommendation.I'll check that out!