Advertisement Do you neatly clip them from newspapers or magazines and file them in page protectors that are then snapped into binders? Or do you deposit those tidy clippings in folders or recipe journals by category — appetizers, salads, entrees, breads, soups, desserts, even with wine suggestions to accompany your dishes?
Here’s a look at three systems:
A book and a list
Tom Jennings of Branchville, S.C., prepares great feasts for family and friends at Cattle Creek Camp Meeting in Bowman, S.C., each summer. His menus are vast — fried chicken, cubed steak, mashed potatoes, stewed rutabaga, string beans, okra rice, Italian cream cake, red velvet cake, lemon pound cake, chocolate cake. You name it, Jennings has it.
And he spends extensive amounts of time planning, keeping a notebook for his camp meeting menus complete with recipes and shopping lists.
The rest of the year, he said, he files with a little less earnestness.
“When someone gives me a recipe or I see one in the paper that I like, I put all of them into one cookbook — I have several cookbooks on a shelf in my kitchen and the first one on the shelf is where I insert my recipe.”
That way, Jennings said, when he goes to look for a recipe, he knows to go to that cookbook, flip it open and start searching.
Later, when he’s preparing a menu, he lists ingredients for the recipe, item by item, so he’ll know what he needs. He’ll have some items in his pantry; others, he’ll need to buy at the store.
“This tip has helped me many times,” he said.
Binders, binders
Chrissie Poore of Irmo, S.C., is another serious cook. An associate at Williams-Sonoma at Columbiana Centre, Poore shares her passion during the store’s free cooking demonstrations.
As someone who has been cooking for more than 40 years, Poore has hundreds of recipes. Hers are filed by category in three-ring binders.
“I’ve got about 10 binders,” she said. They’re filled with page protectors stuffed with favorite recipes. Her binders are sorted by category: chicken recipes, beef recipes, etc.
Poore considers a recipe a suggestion more than an exact plan so she’s often adapting. She doesn’t consider herself super organized, but she does like to collect recipe “suggestions” in her binders — much more so than using the computer to file favorites.
“I’m a hard copy person,” she said.
If you become dependent on a computer, Poore said, “when your computer goes down, you’re sort of up the creek, aren’t you?”
A mother’s plan
Sarah Sawicki, a Columbia mom who participates in a dinner co-op with several other friends, follows a plan she learned from her mother.
“I bought a spiral notebook in which I tape recipes that are either e-mailed from friends, cut out of magazines or the newspaper, or handwritten on old-fashioned recipe cards from family. It gets a little stained from food, but I kind of like it that way,” Sawicki said.
Before she files a recipe. Sawicki places it in a “ones to try” folder and then tests the recipe with her family. If it’s a keeper, it goes in the spiral notebook.
Sawicki also keeps an extensive list of recipes on her computer, which makes it easy to e-mail a favorite to a friend or print and share when someone asks.
COOKING BY COMPUTER
Many programs are available to organize recipes, determine nutritional values and create shopping lists. Among them:
Before purchasing a system, experts advise that you consider these things:
If you don’t want to purchase a computer filing system, there are recipe databases online, including:
