This is an organizational question. I’m organized in many ways, but severely challenged in this particular way…
When you come across a recipe that you want to make, whether online, in a magazine, or cookbook, what is your system for saving the recipe, then transferring the ingredients to a shopping list, and finally making the dish.
If a recipe is online, I just print it. That’s simple. I stick those recipes in a drawer in the kitchen. A recipe in a magazine, no, I don’t tear them out… I usually just let them slip away without capture. I have lots of cookbooks and enjoy reading them and sometimes cooking from them, but haven’t yet developed a systematic way of deciding to try that dish, putting the ingredients on a shopping list, and then making the dish in a timely way before the perishable ingredients, well, perish.
For magazine recipes, I tear it out and put it in a three ring binder. I have page protectors and slip the page into the protector. Anything I print out, I put in the binder as well. I have dividers for type of food, e.g. main dish, salad, etc.
As for making the dish once I find it, I plan my menus for a two week period. I don’t choose which day I’ll make which dish; I just make a list of 10 dinners I want to make over the next two weeks. As I’m making the menu plan I’ll write down dinners I’ve been thinking of making and I’ll flip through my recipe books and binder to find food that looks good and fits with what’s on sale/I feel like eating/my schedule. As I write down each menu item I flip to my grocery list (the next page in the notebook) and write down all the ingredients that I need to buy to make the dish. Then I pay attention to my menu plan for the next two weeks and make the dishes as I feel like making them.
It works really well for me and it keeps my family eating a wide variety of dishes, which is important when you have picky eaters like I do. The more dishes that are in our rotation, the less picky my kids are. It also helps keep grocery costs down. I’m only buying what I need and I’m using what I buy.
I use Evernote to clip recipes online. I have two folders set up: “Recipes to Try” and “Recipes to Keep”. The “to-try” get moved to “to-keep” after I make them and like them.
I like Evernote because I then have the recipe available on my phone and the iPad as well as the computer. Phone is great when I’m in the grocery store going “Oh look, they have lamb on sale, what was that great recipe I saw last week with lamb in it?”
I use the iPad in the kitchen to cook from.
I do prefer printed-out recipes over the iPad, but I feel guilty printing out too much stuff, so I tend to go off the iPad unless it’s a recipe I know I’ll make again. Those recipes get printed out and put in a 3-ring binder with page protectors and dividers, like Miss Woodhouse.
Also on the phone/iPad: Cook’s Illustrated app (with subscription) and Eat Your Books so I can search my cookbooks.
Not the greatest or most organized methodology, but it works.
As far as meal planning, I’m not great at that. I tend to shop twice a week mostly for perishables, and also have a freezer full of meat/stock/etc. 90% of the time, I throw together something from ingredients I have around the house, or I find a recipe where I have enough base ingredients that it works. On the weekends, if I want to cook something specific, I go shopping for those ingredients.
I have a recipe book filled with blank pages. I copy the recipes by hand, including tweaks I like. But only recipes I really like make it into my book. A few years ago I gave my daughter a similar empty recipe book. She copied a few of mine into it.
For most dishes I just need to see the recipe once. But for baking I need the ingredients and instructions so I tear the page out of a magazine or print something from the computer or just write it down on a sheet of paper and stick it inside my Mary Margaret McBride’s Encylopedia of Cooking. Then when I want to use that recipe I wander around the house wondering what I did with it.
This is what I do. I tag recipes with tags to identify cuisines, main proteins, courses. For meal planning, I use the tags “this week’s menu” and “next week’s menu”, and de-tag each “this week’s menu” tag as I make that recipe.
You can forward e-mails of recipes straight into Evernote by sending them to your Evernote e-mail address, and can add the tags and folders right in the subject line after the title. You can upload them as files, too.
These are great ideas. I’ve not used Evernote. It looks like the ideal combination is iPhone/iPad. I have a Blackberry and a kindlefire. Yeah, I’m contrary. I drive a Saturn and still use a Palm Pilot.
The notebook with the clear pockets would work for me.
I just copy and paste into a word doc.
I have a folder with about 200 recipes with instructions and pictures.
I started to cross reference them but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
Online I save recipes that look interesting to Pocket, then I can access them later on my computer or iPad. I have a hardback notebook that I paste in recipes I’ve torn out of newspapers or magazines, indexed by type of food.
My shopping list is on a small whiteboard inside a kitchen cabinet door and I take a picture of it with my phone each time I go shopping.
Coming from someone who is slightly list obsessed (and very memory challenged!) … I have a spreadsheet in my google drive that I write down the recipes I’m interested in making (with link or name of cookbook); I also have columns for main ingredients, course, cuisine … and then I add in when I make it and what alterations I’ve made to the recipe, rate it out of 10, and mark as a yes/no remake. If it is a ‘yes’ to make again, then I’ll also add suggestions for other changes.
I then filter results depending on what I’m looking for.
I save the webpages to my laptop (sometimes blogs etc disappear) but keep track of the links so I can see if there are any updates or comments. If the recipe is in a book/paper I take pics with my phone so I can have the list of ingredients at the supermarket.
How do you get from this to deciding what to fix on any given day, and then making a shopping list with the ingredients, buying those items along with your other shopping, etc.? I also have many recipes on hand but getting from there to the grocery store, back to the kitchen, then to the table…that’s where I’m challenged.
I liked the suggestion of identifying a certain number of dishes to try in the next week or two and making lists of those items for shopping.
P.S. All the while I’m thinking about this, I’m acutely conscious of and grateful for the fact that I have the time, funds, and abundant food choices that I do, such that this is even something to have the pleasure of dealing with.
Interesting. We have a system. She cooks dinner Sunday nights and I always do Mondays and Thursdays. Her schedule is complicated, but she cooks many Tuesdays and we split up Wednesdays. Fridays and Saturdays are restaurants.
She buys “grocery stuff” on Saturdays. I grocery shop for my cooking nights the day of. I like fresh produce and only buy what I need, when I need it.
Not to belabor… but my question is how to go from recipes that you find in magazines, cookbooks, and/online to a shopping list, back to the kitchen, then to the table.
Thanks for your comments, but I’m not so much asking about systems for cooking as systems for snagging and saving recipes when you’re on the web or in the doctor’s office and you see one in a magazine —> to actually getting that dish on the table.
I think it does come down to saving the recipes in some way, either in a binder or through an electronic data gathering system, making a decision that you will try THAT particular recipe (or those particular recipes this week), transferring those specific ingredients to a shopping list, and then of course, being able to locate the recipe again when you get home with snails, fennel, rice wine, orange flower water, and black sesame seeds… <Why was I buying these things again…?>
I’ve taken pictures of recipes in magazines or cookbooks, so that helps. Usually though if you can note where you saw it, you can later look it up in the magazine’s online version. I used to do that with Southern Living recipes when I still got it.
Mostly I use Note which isn’t perfect. I need to convert to Evernote. I refer to the recipe on the phone when I’m at the grocery.
I may just be an unrepentant hipster, but my Moleskine Recipe Journalis where I keep ones I want to redo … granted, that’s mostly because I’m doing my own redactions of medieval recipes, which tend to be erratic on giving quantities.
I use Word, as well. I presently have two folders. I fix whatever comes to mind, making a shopping list with pen and paper, which seems to me to be the simplest way to do things.
As one of the Evernote users - Saturday is my grocery shopping day, so I do my list-making then. I see how many “this week’s menu” recipes are still tagged as such (since I de-tag that after making the dish) and whether they should stay on that list or get dumped. I check my “next week’s menu” list and add the “this week’s menu” tag to each, then delete their “next week” tags. I just look at each recipe to see what ingredients I’m missing, then add them to my list.
The way I do that is I made a list in iOS’s Reminders app called “Groceries,” then as needed I either type an item in or tell Siri to add something to my grocery list. Then I refer to that app on my phone while shopping.
I don’t see why it wouldn’t work on any device that has Internet access. They have versions for Windows/Mac/Android/iOS/Blackberry/Windows Phone. It’s fairly simple, no reason to believe that it works reasonably well everywhere.