Organizing your recipes

You may crave that delicious Cornish hen recipe from the culinary magazine you were reading in your doctor’s office waiting room. And there are six or seven really nice cookbooks on your bookshelf. You just lack the time—and the ingredients—to make them happen. Instead, you’ve boiled down your culinary repertoire to about a dozen staple dishes that get repeated. And repeated. And repeated.

No more. There is a whole world of deliciousness you’re missing by sticking with the spaghetti sauce and whole-wheat linguine in your cupboard. It just takes a little organization to create a culinary data center that’s easy to use and allows you to explore the world of cuisine right from your kitchen.

Finding Recipes
See the sites: If you’re not sure what you have a taste for tonight, then head online. Web sites like cooks.com, epicurious.com and recipezaar.com. Take a quick inventory of the ingredients you have on hand and then type in one or two key elements—e.g. chicken, pork chops or cauliflower. You’ll immediately get a collection of savory options from which to choose that use those ingredients. Most of these sites have comment areas. Be sure to read the comments, because they often have good suggestions for modifying or improving the dishes.

Visit your favorite restaurant online: Another great way to find recipes is to go online to the web sites of your favorite restaurants. Some eateries post a few of their prize dishes online. Ithaca, New York’s famed Moosewood Restaurant is a good example. Or head to some of the sites that purport to divulge secret recipes from America’s top restaurants. Try www.copykat.com or www.topsecretrecipes.com.

Organize a recipe swap: Everyone has a signature dish or two. Get together with a group of friends and request that everyone bring enough copies of their favorite entrée, vegetable, side dish and dessert recipes to go around. Serve a few munchies and beverages and you’ve got a fun gathering—and a new batch of recipes for your files.

Organizing Recipes
Make a binder: A simple plastic binder with clear, full-page sheets can become your new favorite cookbook. Here, you can collect copies of all of your favorite recipes. The clear, plastic page protectors, which are available at most office supply stores, allow you to wipe spills clean. You can organize your recipes by type of dish, such as entrée, side or dessert, or by ingredients—as in “what am I going to do with all this chicken”?

Use online recipe boxes. Sites like epicurious.com and cooks.com have online recipe boxes where you can save recipes you like from the site. That way, you can just retrieve each the next time you want to make that dish.

Make a list. If your favorite recipes are in a wide variety of cookbooks, you have two options: Rip out your favorite recipes (not recommended) or create a spreadsheet or electronic database of them, including the dish, basic ingredients, the book in which the recipe is located, and the page number. That way, you can just take a quick look through your own culinary bibliography and pull the right book right away. Another hint: You might want to include prep time on your list so you don’t choose recipes that need two hours of prep when the hungry family will be home in 30 minutes.

Shelve them: Keep the cookbooks you use most in a convenient place. You can store the others on bookshelves that aren’t as readily accessible to free up space.

Making your recipe collection more organized and user-friendly means less time spent trying to find the right recipe for any occasion. That makes “What’s for dinner?” a far less frustrating question.