There are never enough cookbooks to say you have too many.
If you are just starting on your cooking journey and you are starting your collection of recipes. Are you a “Foodie”/”Food Enthusiast”? You then can never say you have too many cookbooks and recipes, RIGHT???? Or is it just me?
My cookbook collection used to take up two 5-shelf bookcases in my living room. OK, so some of the space was taken up with cooking magazines and binders full of printed recipes. But they count, don’t they? I even had an old Cooking Light Cookbook (back from the late 80’s to the early 1990’s) and other magazines we saved in boxes with my husband’s comic books. Now that we have moved into a house, but with less space to display all the cookbooks I have, most have to be stashed in the basement and in the attic.
Downsizing
When we moved, I HAD to downsize and get rid of the magazines and some of the books. As heartbreaking as it was in choosing, some of the books had to go. The only reason I was able to part with the magazines is because I figured I could still get the recipes online, even though I had no idea what recipes I wanted anyway. Sad, very very sad. I did get up the courage and went through the cookbooks. I was able to get rid of some that I felt were a little, hmm, shall we say debatable as far as decent recipes or could be considered outdated, (you know the ones I’m talking about, think aspic)
Truthfully, even if I cooked one recipe a day for the rest of my life, I probably would not be able to finish trying ALL of them. BUT, did I want to get rid of them? HECK NO! They were a part of me. They were like an extension of my arm. I can just see it now, me being the “Crazy Cookbook Lady” (cat lady but with cookbooks). “Ooh don’t go by that weirdo lady’s house, it’s going to explode from all her cookbooks”. Could you imagine?
But the collecting recipes part hasn’t stopped; have you ever heard of the internet? Pinterest? This is the Foodie’s dream to be able to get any kind of recipe at any time for free. Yay!!!
ORGANIZING
When you are collecting anything, there needs to be some organization. Since recipes come in different formats; books, magazines, those little books at the cashier, internet print outs, recipe cards that have been handed down. How about those collection of recipe cards from a company, think the monthly Betty Crocker recipe card box. I have one! Surprise! It’s my mom’s, but that’s another story.
Now, the question is how to organize all these recipes, books, magazines, and other stuff. Well there are plenty of ways to organize your printed recipes or those you collect directly from web. Internet recipes can be “pinned” directly to a Pinterest board that you created, which is Cooking Enthusiasts dream. So many boards, so little time. Try out one of app style organizers such as Cheftap. You can also manually print the recipe and save it the old fashioned way; need I say, in a binder?
Personally I use Mastercook. I’ve been using it for years and have been successful with it. This program comes with cookbooks installed with the option to create your own. I’m able to pull recipes from the web and index them right into one of the cookbooks in the program or one I created. Do I have all my recipes organized, heck no, but the program helps. This is great, especially, if you want to print an entire book to give it to someone as a gift, for Christmas, a bridal shower or just to pass down those secret family recipes. Yeah, now you got it.
More Organizing…..
Now you are going to say, “Hey but what about all those cookbooks and magazines?” Well now we’re getting to the heart of the article. I use Eat Your Books. Get this, you can either manually enter in the ISBN number of the book, use a hand scanner, your smartphone with a bar code app to scan the code into the website or you could search their library and add the book from there. Then it lists all your books and magazines on “My bookshelf”. You can also list all your favorite cooking blogs from their index and enter recipes. Now it’s all in one place.
Along with keeping your cooking index on file, they also have really great blog articles and a forum as well. What you do need to know is that it is a pay site, according to their information, it’s a $30 annual membership with $3 monthly fee. It’s just my opinion, I think it’s worth it. But you can check it out for yourself.
Is it perfect? No. Some books are not in their library index, in that case you have a choice to request the website to index the book for you or you can input all the information about the book manually. But, what’s really neat, if you are looking for specific recipes, you can type in the search and it will tell you what book and what page it’s on
Lastly, Recipe Magazines
I no longer collect the Food Network Magazines. Those were the magazines that I decided I needed to get rid of. I now collect those recipes directly on their site. The only recipe magazine subscription I have is Cuisine at Home. I have had this subscription for years. It comes out quarterly. You get a printed copy to read at your leisure, but you don’t have to keep it. This is because, as long as you have a paid subscription, you can go into their library and get all the recipes right on their site. How awesome it that?!
Anyway, I really try to restrain myself or I’ll either be competing against Barnes and Noble or need intervention, not quite sure which it’s going to be. I might go off the wagon for the Skinnytaste collection. The only cookbooks I have on display now are the ones I feel that are deserving to be in that special place in my living room.
So now go forth and collect your recipes.