Recipes... its what I'm known for. And I'm also the queen of disorganization when it comes to recipes, and that is with my recipes being posted here on this blog. You have no idea how often I am looking for recipe suggestions, and friends suggest certain dishes to me, and when I ask them for the recipe, they remind me that I have that recipe posted on my blog. Ridiculous, I know, right? I've gotta use these suggestions given to me by a reader to learn to keep my recipes organized!
If you’re good at finding new recipes or creating them yourself, then you’ll quickly have trouble keeping up with where all your recipes are stored. There’s also the risk of losing them. It’s a good idea to both protect them and keep them organized so they’re easy to sort through to find what you’re looking for.
Here are some ideas about how to keep your recipes better organized and safe.
There’s a Notebook and Then There’s a Smart Notebook
Noting down your recipe ideas in a notebook is a great idea. If you never take it anywhere, then a letter-size notebook is ideal because it gives you space for several columns. But if you go over to see friends and cook for them there, then you probably should have a smaller size to make it more convenient to move around with it.
An interesting way to merge the paper notes with the digital realm is with the Smart Notebook from Italian notebook company, Moleskine. As well as producing exquisite notebooks, they have partnered with Adobe and their Creative Cloud system to offer a notebook that lets you write in it and upload digital versions to your online Creative Cloud account. Not only can you access your recipes from anywhere, but if you lose the notebook, you get a second chance.
Recipe Apps
There are many interesting recipe apps available for the PC, Mac, iOS and Android. Some have web apps where you can enter your food recipes, store it in their cloud or download a backup copy to your desktop computer at home.
Apps like Paprika which covers all the aforementioned platforms and Recipe Keeper Online provide useful ways to keep recipes more organized. Many apps allow downloads to keep your recipes safe in case their apps stop development, or their sites go down. Having a backup of your recipes is important when keeping them digitally and not in a simple paper notebook.
Recovering Damaged Recipe Files
People worry about computer files and whether they could become corrupted. Maybe a download of your recipes did not complete 100% or you kept your recipes in a Word document or a spreadsheet file and you cannot access it now.
In a situation where your files have become corrupted, you need a data recovery professional to help you. They will know which software is best to recover different types of files successfully. Depending on the file format, sometimes there’s a single piece of software that recovers just that file type, i.e. A Word document or an Access database. When the recipes are important to you, it’s worth spending a little to get them back if you’ve lost them. After all, they’re precious.
Staying organized with your recipes becomes harder to do the more you have. Pretty soon, you cannot remember the best recipe for vegetable lasagna because you have three of them and you don’t remember which one was the best. This is where having notes and being organized is extremely helpful.
See my disclaimer.