Organizing Recipes

Apart from cookbooks (much more on that later), I keep recipes in a folder on my computer (a Mac), with subfolders for different categories, such as beef, chicken, pork, vegetables, fish and seafood, frozen desserts, etc. I now have about 1400 recipes culled over the years from Gourmet, Bon Appetit, The New York Times, France-Amerique and other publications, as well as recipes from friends and family (for example, Shawan's Mom's St. Louis Style Chili or Teresa's Duck). It is fun and at times moving to stumble across the last category: each recipe evokes memories of a specific occasion and a wonderful dish.

I scan the recipes onto the computer using an inexpensive Canon CardScan LIDE 90. I copy my recipe folder periodically onto a 4 Gig thumb-size drive, which I can take and use anywhere. Last summer we visited friends in Perigord and I cooked a couple of meals from recipes that I had stored on this minuscule device.

Bobby Jay