I can’t be alone with this problem. Lil’ help, please?
I’ve had a subscription to *Cook’s Illustrated *magazine for several years, since '06 I believe. A couple years ago, we added a second subscription to their companion, Cook’s Country. (No, they’re not redundant. Their audience and focus is completely different. Sometimes I don’t wanna make a dinner that involves sixteen ingredients, and sometimes I want the best of the best.) Anyway, for all this time, we’ve just kept the magazines in chronological order. Want a recipe? Pull them off the shelf, flip one by one through each edition until the correct one is found.
Worked Ok at first, when we had a dozen or so. But now, it’s getting tedious, and it’s about to get completely out of hand. I tried setting up an Excel spreadsheet and typing in each edition’s recipe names so I could seach that instead, but … that has failed miserably. They’re very seasonal, so if I’m looking for, say, a long-cooked stew, it’s not gonna be in the July edition. But other than that, it’s tough. To top it off, their cover illustrations are almost never of food that’s actually in any of those recipes (the one with a painting of lovely, almost luminous cauliflower doesn’t have any cauliflower recipes).
Also, they charge extra for access to their website. Any suggestions that don’t involve paying more $$? There’s a broccoli stir-fry that I’ve done before and want to do again, but I can’t find the damn recipe now! What can I do besides looking through each one, one by one?
Lame suggestion, but you can search the site and see recipes listed. You can’t view the recipe itself without a Web subscription, but you can see the month/year it came from.
I have subscribed since 03 and keep them in a large stack on my cookbook shelf. They have pictures of most of their recipes on the inside back cover, so I usually flip through very quickly just looking at the pics when I want to find a particular recipe. After I make a recipe that I like enough to make again I use a sharpie to mark the picture which makes it easier to find again.
Like RythmDvl says, use Google to find the month and year and then look it up. This also works when you want to look up a non-recipe article they wrote like equipment reviews or the best way to clean leeks.
I used to subscribe, but I also was getting the annual bound issue (I’ve been getting them since they started). I just stopped the subscription and now get the annual books once a year.
Librarian here. You could make a simple index using a word processing program, one that allows you to search by word. When you get a new issue, add the recipe titles and issue info to your file. Then when you need a broccoli recipe, pull up the file, search for broccoli, and you should get the recipes with broccoli in the title. Takes a bit of time to set it up, but once it’s done, just a few minutes every month to add to it.
Or you could cancel the print subscription and just get it online.