I woke up at five this morning after dreaming something ridiculous that I won’t go into here. (It wasn’t salacious, sadly. Just odd.) The key part was that my husband was somehow melded into my high school boyfriend in that weird way of dreams. So that when I woke up my brain decided to replay in gory detail how awful I was to said boyfriend when I went away to college. There’s nothing I can do about it now, and also I don’t think it was really THAT bad, and also we were friendly years afterwards so I don’t think there are lasting scars on his end, plus we are both married and I haven’t thought about him in countless months. But thank you, brain, for steeping me in shame at so early an hour so I can bask in it all day long.
Last night I made an excellent recipe for zucchini noodles. Let me state for the record here that I have no patience for foods masquerading as other foods. I love zucchini, and therefore I enjoy zucchini noodles (although in their noodleishness they are difficult to eat). But I’m not going to try to convince you that they are a good or even fair approximation of noodles themselves. I’m not going to replace them in my recipe for spaghetti and meat sauce, for instance. I am not going to dress them with cheese and pretend they bear any resemblance to macaroni and cheese. They are not noodles. They are zucchini in noodle form. If you don’t like zucchini, you will probably not enjoy them. I discovered this the hard way, by trying cauliflower rice a few years ago. NEVER AGAIN, Internet. Never again. I don’t like cauliflower and spending nearly an hour rasping it against a box grater and getting cauliflower shards all over my kitchen did not change that in the least. I keep hearing about cauliflower mashed potatoes and cauliflower pizza crust and while I am intrigued, I am NOT going to fall for it. STOP PRETENDING, cauliflower. Just be who you are.
ANYWAY. The recipe I tried last night is really good, but it is good in a zucchini way. If you like zucchini you should try it: Easy 10 Minute Asian Zucchini Noodles from Gimme Delicious.
What do you do when you find a recipe you like, and you want to try it again? I’m really curious, by the way. Do you have a list on your phone? A folder on your desktop? A physical file folder into which you stow printed recipes?
I really want to know, because I haven’t found a good system.
As pretty much sole cook for our household, this is the kind of boring thing I spend a lot of time thinking about. As I’ve mentioned previously, we eat a lot of meals that look like Chicken + Vegetable. That is a combination that gets boring realllllllllly quickly, so I am always on the lookout for new, delicious ways to shake up the boring. But there are three problems I’ve run into:
- What is the best way to keep track of recipes that look good but I haven’t tried?
- What is the best way to separately track recipes that I have tried and want to use again?
- What is the best way to avoid re-making a recipe that I have tried and was terrible?
Okay, maybe they are three variations on the same problem. What it comes down to is that I need some sort of filing system. One that is more efficient and comprehensive and located in one, easy-to-access spot than what I currently use.
What I do now is a combination of things. First, I have a folder on my laptop where I bookmark recipes that I want to try. Since I follow a bunch of food blogs on Feedly, it’s really easy for me to put things into my Recipes folder.
But it’s super unwieldy. I have SO MANY recipes. And there’s no rhyme or reason to them, either. Chicken dishes and veggie sides and frosting recipes and how-to posts for making rainbow layer cakes and the best marinades for steak are all jumbled together in the same folder, and many of those are recipes I’ve tried and either liked or NOT.
This blog post is chock FULL of really boring, really poorly lit and off-kilter photos! I know my photography skillz keep you coming back!
You may be thinking, Why not just go in and set up some additional folders? And you would be smart for thinking that, and also I tried that and it isn’t working. First, I had been collecting recipes for about a year before I went in and tried to organize them, so it was already a jumbled mess. Second, the organization tools at my disposal are not particularly user friendly. I can’t easily grab a recipe or ten and drag and drop them into the Veggie Sides folder, for instance. Getting things into the appropriate folder involves a lot of scrolling and it is tedious and time consuming. Third, I still run into the issue of what to do with things I’ve already tried. Sure, I could set up a sub-folder in each category for Make Again and Don’t Make Again… but that gets to be even more unwieldy and also I am kind of lazy.
To the left is an example of what’s inside one of my folders. Supposedly, this contains favorite recipes that I should return to again and again. This is the first time I’ve opened this folder in many months, so it’s not really working as planned. Also, you may notice that I occasionally (okay, more often than reasonable) bookmark something I’ve already bookmarked. I REALLY need a better system.
PLUS, I am not always on my computer doing stuff. I do a lot of recipe finding on my phone. So I have a folder of recipes on my phone, too… and getting them to my computer is not simple. I really need a system that works across devices.
The best part of my system is my weekly dinner plan email. Each week before I go grocery shopping, I create an email to myself that lists all the meals and includes links to online recipes. Sometimes I’ll open the email a few days in advance, if I already know that I’ll be making something specific, or if it’s a week where I’m feeding people beyond my own immediate family. I always reply to the previous week’s dinner email, so there’s a single record of everything I’ve ever planned to eat since March of 2017 when I started it.
Then, after the week’s meals, I try to write notes to myself about what worked and what didn’t. So after last night’s zucchini noodles success, I responded the email and wrote, DELICIOUS! MAKE AGAIN.
This email is also really useful for any modifications I do to a recipe. For instance, last year I found this Martha Stewart recipe for crockpot garlic chicken that sounded so good, but wasn’t. But instead of giving up on it, I kept tinkering with it until I got it right. And I put those notes to myself in my dinner planning email. If I get any feedback on the recipe from my husband, I put those in the notes. So it’s all there in one place.
I first tried the Martha Stewart recipe in May of 2017. My reaction was that it was too sweet. Hot tip: “More lemon juice” can solve most of the world’s ills. At least foodwise.
Here is where I recorded the modifications that made the Martha Stewart recipe not only edible but delicious. Ah memories. This is also the day when I discovered my husband — whom I’ve known for SEVENTEEN YEARS — doesn’t really like soup.
(Sometimes, when I have the wherewithal, I post the modified recipe here. Like with the “chicken tikka masala” recipe I revamped to suit my own needs. It got to be too annoying to look at the original recipe and try to remember what I changed each time I made it.)
So my meal planning email is the best part of my meal planning system. But it’s not perfect. Sometimes I have to scroll and scroll through old emails to find what I’m looking for. And, because I haven’t mastered the art of organizing what I haven’t tried, I tend to go back to the same things over and over.
I’ve contemplated doing a weekly meal plan blog post. Many bloggers do this, and I always enjoy reading them. And I could always add notes to myself in the comments. But again, this does nothing for the stacks and stacks of recipes I have yet to try.
There’s got to be an app that handles this, right? But I don’t want to look for and evaluate and try a bunch of them. And honestly, thinking about moving all my carefully curated but as-yet-untried recipes to a new place sounds exhausting. But I WANT something better and I suppose I am willing to do a certain amount of work to make it happen.
How do YOU keep track of what you’re cooking? What’s working and what isn’t? Have you come across a magic app that does it all? If you have a meal planning and tracking system you love, I am HERE FOR IT.
life of a doctor's wife 
I hope someone suggests something great that I can also use! I currently use Pinterest but I haven’t figured out a way to flag things that I’ve tried and note alterations or other comments (I think maybe you CAN do it, but i haven’t figured it out so obviously it needs to be easier/more obvious). Also I wish it had a way to drag recipes into a folder or something, so I could collect every recipe for the upcoming week in one place to reference back. And then in my dreams it would also create a master shopping list (organized by aisle??) based off of all the recipes in the folder, so i can shop for all of my ingredients for a week of recipes together. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK? 🙂
Wouldn’t it be WONDERFUL to have a master shopping list app??? I would love that. But of course it would have to be able to add like items; so if three recipes called for an onion, it would need to have “onion – 3” instead of three separate entries for onion. If I’m dreaming, you know.
YUM, I will have to try those soy zucchini noodles. (I can count on you to stand with me on the fact that we shouldn’t use the word “Zoodles,” right? Heh.)
I’m mostly just using Pinterest at this point, as a recipe box. When I got married (17 years ago WHUT?), I already had one recipe book, the kind you write in, with blank pages and Categories like “Main Dishes,” and “Sides and Soups” — and I received another as a gift. They’re both full to bursting now, mostly with recipes I printed out when the Internet was new. Drives me crazy and I have a hard time remembering which recipe is (stuffed) in which book.
So Pinterest has helped. Especially now that the app on my phone 1) stays open and 2) stays open to the webpage where the recipe was found. It used to always default back to Pinterest “home” and then I’d have to click thru to my Board, find my Pin, and click back out to Safari for the actual recipe. Horrible. So glad they fixed that.
I like your email to yourself! Kinda cool – do you print the first page and take it w/you to the store, or just use your phone? I still have to make a list on Saturday or Sunday mornings, pencil on paper, to take with me. I can’t go electronic for my grocery list. 😉
I actually kind of forgot about Pinterest! Which is dumb because I have HUNDREDS (at least dozens) of recipes saved there. And if memory serves, it’s MUCH easier to move things from a “To Try” folder in Pinterest than it is in my bookmarks folder. AND if they’ve fixed the issue you mentioned, I should definitely give it another try!
I think this answer will be too low-tech for what you’re looking for, but what I use is a recipe box, with recipe cards. If I find a new recipe I want to try, l print it out or rip it out of the magazine, and put it on the side of the fridge with a magnet. If we try it and I like it, I keep it on the fridge. If we have it again and it still seems good, I write it on a recipe card and put it in the recipe box.
It’s so logical and ordered! I like it. Gold star for you!
NOT too low tech! And I have many questions! How many recipes do you have on the fridge at once? Do you make notes on the recipes themselves? How often do you try something new, vs making something familiar? And you HANDWRITE the recipes on cards? I am SO IMPRESSED by that. I think I would worry about messy writing or copying incorrectly, but I could certainly keep a file folder of the printed/torn recipes that were deemed keepers.
Ugh, I’m so with you on veggies masquerading as carbs — NO! I do a couple of things with recipes I want to try — my main app is Pepperplate, which works on my phone and my PC. It’s annoying that some of the more popular sites don’t work automatically with it (Smitten Kitchen, for instance) but you can manually enter recipes too.
If I’m too lazy to manually enter or I’m in a hurry, I use Pocket to save the webpage and I use tags — recipe, Instant Pot, whatever seems appropriate.
If I make something and don’t like it, I delete the recipe right away. I also use an Excel spreadsheet to meal plan, planning a week of recipes at a time. I keep a list of our favorite meals and pull from that. It takes me maybe 30 minutes and helps me make my grocery list too. 🙂
You sound so well organized! I will have to look into the apps you recommend – thanks!
I don’t have an app, or really a system – other than bookmarking everything on my phone, but just wanted to say that I’m impressed with the email idea and also to say you look like you’ve got some great recipes there. I’m feeling quite inspired now to find & try some of them!
I am NOT a pinterest user and I am clueless about using apps. I think I should probably try more recipes ,but I tend to stick with the tried and true ones. I find it hard to please our crowd, so I stick with what I know most everyone will eat. I did make a chart about a year and a half ago listing the meals I make regularly. I passed it out to the kids and Coach. They ranked my recipes. Now when Laddie comes home from college, I am careful not to lead with a dinner that is not in his top 5. Most of my recipes are in a box, like Swistle. They are written out on cards, or torn out/printed out and shoved in there. I have been thinking I need a better system, but I am not one to embrace technology.
I use pinterest, and have them ordered into different categories. I did have to spend some time setting it up. I have a few hundred pinterest boards on various topics, so I have all my recipes under boards labeled Food–Chicken, Food–Bread, Food–Crockpot and so on, and the boards are alphabetized (I started with “Food” so that when I alphabetized the boards they are all in the same general vicinity, otherwise the Bread board might be 100 boards away from the Potato board). If I don’t like a recipe I delete it. I don’t think there’s a way to make notes.
This morning my husband asked me for the recipe for pizza dough so he could make it for lunch, and I just went into Pinterest on my phone and texted him the link.
I was just thinking about this very thing the other day – I need some sort of system for filing away favorite recipes to help me when I’m in a meal planning slump. Mostly I just have a big file of recipes on Pinterest (but recipes I’ve made and loved are in the same file as recipes I haven’t tried yet, so I need a better system) and then I have tried a few Skinnytaste recipes so many times that I just have to type the beginning of the recipe name into my search bar and the URL pops up. But now you’ve got me wanting to really organize my recipe ideas into a more logical system because it kinda drives me crazy that I don’t have anything like this figured out. Oy vey.
Do you have Pinterest? You can sort your recipes into different categories and make notes on them. It’s really easy and there’s an app for your phone and website for your laptop.
I am also very low tech, but if I make something I like I print it out and put it in a clear binder sleeve in a regular three ring binder. I can write notes on the paper, but it is protected when I am cooking, each sleeve can hold two recipes, and I find it easier to flip through the sleeves to find what I am looking for. Once a year or so I organize the binder so all the categories are roughly together in the same part of the binder. That being said, I have a ton of recipe posts tagged in feedly completely unorganized, but if I make something I like it goes in the binder. I prefer to look at a recipe on paper while cooking versus my phone or computer.
Yes! I do this, complete with the clear plastic sleeve.
We also have cookbooks and it’s important for me to note that the cookbooks are in the kitchen, not in another room. I will write in my cookbooks with abandon after making a recipe. Many of those notations include “more lemon zest.”
I have a recipe box and a lot of pages torn out of magazines, or written shorthand on a scrap piece of paper. I did recently read about an app that combines recipes into one list though, ie “so if three recipes called for an onion, it would need to have “onion – 3” instead of three separate entries for onion.” The article (on yNAB.com) said “Paprika is another option that lets you sync your recipes, grocery list and meal plan between your computer and your tablet or phone. Use the built-in browser to search online for recipes and save them to Paprika with the tap of a button.You can create reusable menus from your favorite meals, planning out a week or even an entire month. While you’re at the store, use the app to check your list. A cool feature that Paprika offers is combining similar ingredients. (If one meal requires one egg and a second meal requires two eggs, Paprika shows three eggs on your shopping list.) You can also organize your list by the layout of the grocery store.” Not endorsing them since I haven’t used them, but might be worth checking out?
Definitely worth checking out! Thank you!