Recipe for a Mess

Like many folks who love to cook, I collect recipes. Lots of recipes. And I'm not talking about cookbooks, I'm talking about loose recipes gathered from magazines, cooking classes, friends, my CSA, my mom, and even the ones I've created myself. Knowing how quickly such a habit can create clutter, I'm generally pretty selective in the recipes I keep. There's no point in collecting game recipes, or the best way to roast your holiday turkey instructions, since I don't eat meat. However, I'm good at using some non-vegetarian recipes as inspiration to create something vegan. For instance, for my sweetie's birthday last year, I made him an awesome, entirely vegan, "pork"-stuffed tamale casserole by drawing ideas from a number of different recipes.

I used to have a system that worked pretty well for my recipes. Like my mother before me, I used a card file box with dividers for types of dishes. Any recipe that was worth keeping or trying went in there. Since I had to rewrite the recipe on the 5x7" cards, it meant I really had to like it or be fairly sure I'd try it out. Obviously, this was somewhat labor intensive so eventually I started a file folder of recipes that I wanted to try but didn't want to transcribe until I knew whether they were keepers. This worked for a while, as long as I kept working my way through the new recipes.

Time passed and the Internet began to be a good source for recipes. Discussion boards, forums, and websites yielded more recipes than I could shake a whisk at. It's easy to forget where a recipe is online, so I began saving them to folders on my computer. Periodically, that had to be cleaned up and organized so I could find specific recipes when I wanted them. I printed them out as I planned to try them, throwing the sheet in a drawer when I was done.

When I joined the CSA a couple of years ago, the weekly newsletters became another source for great recipes. These were centered around the produce we received, often making it easy to plan meals without searching elsewhere for recipes. While their recipe database online is wonderful for finding the recipes, I don't have a computer in the kitchen so I need a printed copy. This means tracking down the right newsletter or printing the recipe from the website.


I now have a big mess of recipes. The drawer has 4" of loose recipes in it. The CSA newsletter file folder is an inch and a half deep. I have a notebook of my favorite recipes that I put together for family and friends one Christmas. It's two inches thick. My card file has hundreds of recipes in it, some tried and true, and some I still have never tried. I'd estimate another couple hundred recipes, at least, are currently on my computer (and have not been organized or cleaned up in months).

Three times already this month, I've had to dig through the drawer to find recipes I know are in there. While doing this, I spotted duplicates of several recipes because I couldn't find them other times and reprinted them despite knowing it was a waste of paper and ink. I waste an incredible amount of time searching for what I need, yet I resist investing a lot of time to clean this mess up. Every time I decide I have to do something about it, I become paralyzed with indecision.

Here's my problem with the recipes. I've got a fair amount of time and effort invested into multiple systems. I'd rather have a single system but I can't figure out which is best. Here are the pros and cons as I see them:

Computer
Pros: huge storage capacity, relatively easy to oranize, easy to add or delete recipes, easy to share with others
Cons: must print recipe to use, uses paper and ink to print, printed recipes still need to be organized somehow

Card File
Pros: comfort with familiar system, many years of favorite recipes already there, easy to use and modify individual recipes, cards easy to work from in kitchen, compact and easy to store, doesn't rely on access to computer
Cons: labor-intensive to transcribe recipes, must be copied or entered on the computer to share by e-mail

Printed Recipes
Pros: could be easily organized in file folders or notebooks
Cons: can be a little harder to work from in kitchen when paper flops over, bulkier storage, CSA newsletters contain unrelated recipes making it hard to file by category (and later find)


As you can see, there are good arguments to be made in favor of each system and there are problems with each one. Yes, I could easily use all three systems, but I really want one stream-lined system. I even tried entering my recipes into a database once, but quickly abandoned that idea as way too much work, especially since it doesn't resolve the problem of still needing to print out any recipe I actually want to make.

So, here I am, hosting this big decluttering challenge and I don't know what to do about one of my big troublespots. My first step today will be going through all of the loose sheets to cull out any recipes that no longer appeal. Hopefully that will reduce the stack a little. I may also do the same thing with the card file. I'm not sure what to do about the CSA newsletters yet.

I'd like to hear what works for you to keep your recipes organized.

PS: if someone wants to send me a free laptop computer for use in my kitchen, please do so! Then I'll put everything on it, run it off a little solar panel, and quit wasting paper. Oh, and please include the solar panel, too.