Organizing Recipes on Your Computer

Here is how I save all of my recipes. I have a folder on my hard drive called Recipes (very original, doncha think? LOL). Under it are sub-folders for categories, like soups, vegan, etc. All recipes are saved here, so if I can just remember that the recipe has tomato in the title, I simply search for tomato and all the ones with tomato in their name instantly pop up.

With an advanced search, you may not even need to know "any" word in the title, because it will review all the words within the recipe and pull out all the ones that contain the word you designate, although in my case that would be too many to help if I searched for tomato. In that case, I might search for rigatoni or some other less commonly-used ingredient I knew was in my desired recipe.

Storing my recipes this way saves me hours of scanning through clippings, notebooks, recipe files, or whatever method I used in the past, and I think I've used them all, including recipe software, which costs money and has to be updated periodically.

Finally, if you're hesitant about taking up space on your hard drive (although files like this don't use much; it's programs that are space hogs), you can look for ways to store your files "in the cloud". If you do that, not only do you save hard drive space, but if you're visiting somewhere and decide to treat everyone to your special recipe of (your favorite here), you can pull that recipe up from any computer. I hope this is helpful to someone.

By Jayni from Richmond, TX