This is so not the point of this episode, but: WHY do so many grandmothers have similar handwriting?? I swear, if you'd have shown me this recipe card and said my mother's mother had written it, I would believe you.
Ooh, I know this one! They all learned how to write using the Palmer method, and penmanship was graded much more strictly prior to the advent of the personal computer.
I swear by the Paprika app! You can work off a tablet or phone or print them out. The sharing function is also handy, too. They have a sale around Thanksgiving each year, FYI.
I keep recipes in a binder so my family can access them, and I am not a believer in gatekeeping recipes. Gardening is about generosity and I believe cooking should be, too.
Cherished recipes include my dad's handwritten recipe for pierogi via my Ukrainian grandmother and my half-Sicilian mom's "Sunday sauce"--a very meat-forward sauce I never much cared for but my kids love it. In college I hand-wrote some of my mom's recipes for things like deviled eggs and potato salad (both using Hellman's) and am glad I have them now that she's gone and I can't ask her anymore.
Fellow Paprika devotee, and I wanted to add on a correction to something I heard in the podcast: Paprika isn't a subscription! It's a one-time* purchase, which I love.
*They do have different apps for different operating systems, so if you want it on your phone and on desktop you'll have to pay twice. But I still vastly prefer that to a subscription model.
- locks in recipes once you've saved them (I use this for Milk Street recipes that are free when first released and then pay walled). This is *also* great for preventing loss when Internet recipes get changed or moved.
- has an edit function so that rather than add notes for how you alter a recipe, you can alter the text itself.
- has a simple folder/subfolder system so you can easily find recipes by category. What I need to do next is make a season category, because often choosing what to make is subconsciously very seasonal.
Other ways I've used it is copy and pasting newsletter recipes into it, or getting digital versions of favorite cookbooks from the library and then copy and pasting the essential ones that live in rotation into the app (I'll also watch for ebook sales on cookbooks because I like having physical and digital copies of my favorites). It's really helped keep things organized, and having it on my phone means that if we make last minute meal I have the recipes with me.
I never knew I had so many thoughts and opinions about this topic until I listened to this episode. Great one, Anne and Melody!
Part of the reason that food blogs have all that life story that we have to scroll through to get to the recipe is because I believe there's a copyright rule that a recipe alone is not copyrightable but your life story part is, so if you just post recipes on your blog, they're not copyrightable unless they have that life story attached to them. Either way, I'm so grateful for the jump to recipe button, haha.
Secondly, I wanted to offer an idea that my partner and I had earlier this year. We're combining two households, as this is a second marriage (essentially - we're not yet married) for both of us, and we both have a little bit of a hoarder tendency. So our recipe collections, which were in binders, were overflowing with magazine cut outs and print outs and even newspaper clippings, in addition to the cookbooks that we had amassed over the years. And so we decided to do something called Recipe Night! (The exclamation mark is essential.) We put it in our calendar, and then on the night we had set aside, we poured wine (liberally) and each of us went through our recipe collections, letting go of anything that wasn't an "OMG I CAN'T WAIT TO MAKE THIS FOR YOU!" recipe. And then the VERY slimmed down collections were merged into one binder. It was really fun and exciting to be reminded of our favorite recipes.
Now, maybe once a month, we pull out the binder and pick a few" new" recipes that we want to make that month, along with the usual quick meals that are standard in our household. We also keep occasional print outs and magazine cut outs on the corkboard in our kitchen, as our "hey, remember we wanted to try this?" queue.
(Okay, real talk - getting this comment felt like I did years ago, when running coat check for a very fancy perfume launch at the Guggenheim, where I didn't blink seeing and interacting with A-list celebrities but then lost my shit internally when a couple of my favorite fashion bloggers showed up. SQUEEEEEE AHP loved my post!!!)
It's funny, reflecting on this, is that while I identify certain food traditions in my family very strongly, we are very much not a "pass down a recipe" people. There ARE recipes that are written down, but they are treated almost more like historical curiosities. My great-grandmother wrote down some recipes but they're full of measurements like "a soup bowl of flour" and "the 10 cent jar of mustard" and whatnot. And there's a written recipe for pasta sauce that says "3 T cinnamon" which, if it indeed means 3 Tablespoons of cinnamon, is a frankly ludicrous quantity of cinnamon for the amount of tomato, PLUS I am sure her Southern Italian peasant forebears did not use spices in that quantity.
We are very much "measure with your heart" people, I guess. We don't pass down recipes so much as the set of tips and tricks that various family members have innovated and we take or leave. Very little is written down, and if it is it's because someone collected the recipe from some other source back when "copying it onto a recipe card and sticking it in a box" was the most reliable way to save a recipe. (I asked my grandmother once for her recipe for pumpkin log and she told me she just used the one from the Libby's can! So I made one and it tasted just like I remembered. :D )
So while I think about my family's holiday food traditions, for example, and like to have lasagna on the table at Christmas, I'm not making my grandmother's lasagna. I'm making MY lasagna, but I'm thinking of her. I know how my dad's sauce gets the particular flavor that makes it his and when I want that, I know which brand of cheap jug wine to go buy to achieve it, but most of the time I'm just making sauce my way. When someone asks me how to make something of mine, I'm usually giving them the "this is less a recipe than a game plan" speech.
For recipes my spouse and I add to our repertoire, usually that happens one of two ways:
- We think of something we want to make, and then read a bunch of recipes for it to get a sense of how it works, and cobble something together like that.
- We find a recipe that sounds interesting from a trusted source (Smitten Kitchen, Cook's Illustrated, whatever), make it more or less as written once or twice, and then over time the "measure with your heart" takes over and it becomes a flexible method.
I love reading cookbooks like novels, honestly. I learn a lot. I've got a Thomas Keller French Laundry cookbook that I am NEVER going to cook from but WOW do I love reading it.
The recipe most passed down and shared in my family is for my great-great grandma’s relish. It’s excellent on grilled cheese (and any other) sandwiches, baked ham, and more. As a child I ate it by the spoonful, which was my mother’s signal that it was time for me to learn how much effort went into the process of making it: two days, much food processing, several hours of stirring and ladling and water bath canning. It’s been shared around the family and with close friends, and then, a number of years ago, my mom submitted an essay to the local paper in response to a question about family recipes, so it’s never been particularly gatekept. (I can’t find the link right now but will come back and add it!)
How do we hang on to the recipe? My mom’s copy lives in a binder full of great recipes, with all sorts of handwritten notes added over the years. Mine is a photocopy of hers from after I moved out and wanted to make it on my own for the first time. I have been known to text her in the middle of the process when I half-remember a step that doesn’t appear to be written down because everyone used to just know that’s how it was done, or to brainstorm updates (I don’t have a gravy maker to shake up the water/flour mix, but I do have a protein shaker cup!).
Anyway tl;dr is that I’m excited to listen to this episode and hear about other family recipes here in the comments!
I struggle with keeping family recipes because my mom will just list out ingredients and say to put them in "when it feels right" or "until it tastes good" because her recipes are developed from a lot of practice and intuition that doesn't translate well to explaining to me!
This is 100% how cooking works in our family. There's no recipe, there's just, "Oh, I make stuffed cabbage like anyone else, except I use V8 juice in the cooking liquid." "It's just the Toll House recipe for chocolate chip cookies, but I put in an extra quarter cup of flour." "I use celery salt and dried parsley in the city chicken breading, just until it tastes like I remember."
This is also how my partner's mother cooks! We often try to get her to elaborate—"but how much sour cream?" "Oh, until it's the right colour/consistency!" Her cooking is fabulous and I hope we can figure out a way to learn from her!
I use the Plan to Eat app for recipe organization and I love it. I haven’t used Paprika so I can’t compare but PTE is well worth the $50 a year subscription.
Every time I cook something and it turns out well, I take a photo of it and store it in a cooking album on my iPhone. Then, when I’m making a shopping list on a Sunday and planning meals for the week, I scroll through the album for inspiration. This especially helps if you’re stumped on what to cook. Scrolling through an album of things you’ve already made, that you know are within your skill set and most importantly, *taste good*, is so much more accessible than scrolling a recipe app/book/blog (in my opinion). It’s also just kind of fun to scroll back and look at all the meals you’ve made. I struggle with managing my appetite and find it to be a bit all over the place, and being a visual person as well means that this album really helps kick my appetite into gear. It’s like my eyes are attached to my stomach lol.
I used to be much more adventurous in my cooking but since having 2 kids I have sort of fallen back on my midwestern roots - lots of comfort foods, casseroles that we eat for days, meat + carb + vegetable, etc. It's actually been lovely to look at my plate and see the exact type of meal that my mom used to make growing up (recent example was fish sticks, mashed potatoes, & frozen peas - real gourmet stuff).
I have used Evernote to organize my recipes for years - occasionally I'll look around to see if there's a better alternative, but haven't found one that I like yet. (Paprika seems great but is a little too restrictive for me - I like to be a little more open-ended in what I do with my notes.) The web clipper lets you add stuff directly from your browser, and then I use tags for dish type (main, salad, etc.), key ingredients, dietary restrictions, family recipes, etc. (I should note - Evernote was really heading downhill a few years ago but has recently been acquired by a new company and is *fantastic* again.)
I also have to shout out the Supercook site/app (https://www.supercook.com/) - put in all the ingredients you have around your house and it will churn out a bunch of ideas for how to use them. The recipes themselves aren't always great - they're just scraped from random internet sites - but it is helpful in generating ideas.
I'm a fellow Evernote user for recipes! (and other random stuff, which is why it seems like more work than it's worth to look into a recipe-specific app) I know people were mad when they started charging last year, but I figure I got a decade of free use out of it and I have literally thousands of notes, so it makes sense to pay for something I use every single day. Saving the Supercook link - thanks!
I have a different analog and digital solution from what was mentioned in the episode.
I have a Moleskine recipe notebook that I use to write down my favourites recipes. I have been carrying it through all my moves and adding to it for 15+ years. I write down the source of each recipes (including “mom’s recipe”, but with conversion from “a bit of this” to “1 teaspoons”…) and modifications/simplifications I’ve made to them over the years, it’s a bit tedious to manually write down from website/cookbooks/etc, but I like that I can adjust the format to how I like for ease of cooking and it’s tidy. That notebook would be one of the first things I would try to save if my house was on fire.
I also have a shared note on iPhone with my partner of all the weeknight-friendly favourite recipes. Really helps when one of us ask “what do you want to do for dinner?” (With photos from the relevant page from above notebook also saved, so that a trip to the grocery store after work is easy!)
This episode brought up a lot of feelings in me. My mom cooked every day when I was growing up, utilizing food as a creative outlet. Many of the dishes I had as a kid were Puerto Rican staples, but she often threw in her own favorites, like Swedish meatballs or lasagna.
She’s dying of cancer as I type this. There’s so much I’ll miss about her, but especially the love and care she brought to everything she prepared.
So as a mom, I was always a weekly dinner planner, if for no other reason than I didn’t want to hit multiple grocery stores multiple times a week. I also get easily bored, so each week I am probably making something I have never made before mixed in with current favs and old reliables, mostly from food blogs and cookbooks. But the internet and my memory is not as forever as one might hope, so my system evolved into menu planning is recorded on a google calendar and everyone else who will be home that night get either invited or the event is copied on to their calendar. The main and sides are the event, and the cookbook or web address are entered as location. Eventually the bests gets copied/pasted or typed into a google doc so it is searchable, sharable and legible. Now I just need a tagging system for things besides ingredients, like seasons, hot weather etc
Any other ANYLIST app users out there?! I’ve been using for years and years. It lets you import from most blogs and sites (as long as their html is standard) or input recipes by hand and then you can create collections, add notes and best of all add ingredients you need to buy at the store - including how much so you never get there and aren’t sure if you needed 2 or 4 boxes of butter for all your thanksgiving recipes combined! You can pin recipes to a calendar, share the subscription with your household and also use it for other kinds of lists (packing! Costco! Etc). I will check out paprika but I think I have over 300 recipes saved in AnyList at this point. I can search - artichokes and spinach- and find 10 ideas for what to make with them. Only downside is I never crack open paper cookbooks of which I have many. 😞 if the AnyList app developers ever shut it down I will cry. I almost did when google stopped supporting me yelling “hey google, add kosher salt to the shopping list”but I’ve somehow survived.
I love AnyList, but I don’t use it for recipes, just lists. The shared grocery list is the reason I keep paying the annual fee. In theory, it means whenever someone enters a grocery store they should look at the list and see if there’s anything else they need to pick up. In practice, the kids and even the husband don’t always look, but I remain hopeful.
I love it when recipes tell you ahead of time what tools you need, so I can get everything out ahead of time and make sure I actually have what’s required.
I know I'm late to the discussion, but I'm surprised not to see any comments from people who save recipes the way I do. For online recipes that I want to try, I bookmark them. I have a Recipes bookmark folder, and then a bunch of subfolders in categories that makes sense to me. For favorite seasonal ingredients, those recipes are in their own folders so that when I have those ingredients I can quickly peruse all the related recipes (examples include: Pumpkin, Apples, Strawberries). I also have folders for situations: Breakfast, Dinner (broken down by Beef, Poultry, Pork, and Vegetarian), Tea Ideas (for afternoon teas with my sisters).
Once I try a recipe, it gets added to a spreadsheet I've been keeping for a few years. I will link the recipe or list the cookbook, categorize it (cookie, main dish, breakfast, bread, etc), include the cuisine style (Italian, Indian, American, etc), how easy it was (from super easy to a bit involved to difficult), whether I would make it again (Absolutely, Yes, Maybe, Definitely Not), How good it was (delicious, good, bad), and then notes with things like whether I swapped any ingredients, improvements I should make next time, which type of apples were used, etc. This spreadsheet has basically become my personal bible, and due to the ease of filters, I can quickly pull up recipes that I may have forgotten about to cook again.
I don't have a lot of passed down recipes, and I wish I had more. This episode reminded me that my grandpa's obituary actually mentioned his chocolate chip cookies and apple pie winning prizes at local fairs, but I've never come across recipes specifically noted as his. Perhaps I should look into this... Personally, I never gatekeep recipes for food I've shared and people have liked, because I see no point in not sharing the wealth!
I had wanted to ask this question for the episode but didn't get my stuff together in time - how often does anyone make a recipe they see on Instagram or otherwise solely in video form? I know I'm totally old school and still mostly get my recipes from food blogs I started following in the late 00s, but if I can't copy or save a simple ingredient/instruction list to my recipe collection, chances are I'm never going to make it. Even more so if the poster makes you comment to get any info!
This is so not the point of this episode, but: WHY do so many grandmothers have similar handwriting?? I swear, if you'd have shown me this recipe card and said my mother's mother had written it, I would believe you.
Ooh, I know this one! They all learned how to write using the Palmer method, and penmanship was graded much more strictly prior to the advent of the personal computer.
Heidi, you are my hero. Thank you for unraveling that mystery!
I swear by the Paprika app! You can work off a tablet or phone or print them out. The sharing function is also handy, too. They have a sale around Thanksgiving each year, FYI.
I keep recipes in a binder so my family can access them, and I am not a believer in gatekeeping recipes. Gardening is about generosity and I believe cooking should be, too.
Cherished recipes include my dad's handwritten recipe for pierogi via my Ukrainian grandmother and my half-Sicilian mom's "Sunday sauce"--a very meat-forward sauce I never much cared for but my kids love it. In college I hand-wrote some of my mom's recipes for things like deviled eggs and potato salad (both using Hellman's) and am glad I have them now that she's gone and I can't ask her anymore.
Fellow Paprika devotee, and I wanted to add on a correction to something I heard in the podcast: Paprika isn't a subscription! It's a one-time* purchase, which I love.
*They do have different apps for different operating systems, so if you want it on your phone and on desktop you'll have to pay twice. But I still vastly prefer that to a subscription model.
OH WOW!!!
Co-sign signing paprika! I love that it
- has a recipe amount multiplication feature
- locks in recipes once you've saved them (I use this for Milk Street recipes that are free when first released and then pay walled). This is *also* great for preventing loss when Internet recipes get changed or moved.
- has an edit function so that rather than add notes for how you alter a recipe, you can alter the text itself.
- has a simple folder/subfolder system so you can easily find recipes by category. What I need to do next is make a season category, because often choosing what to make is subconsciously very seasonal.
Other ways I've used it is copy and pasting newsletter recipes into it, or getting digital versions of favorite cookbooks from the library and then copy and pasting the essential ones that live in rotation into the app (I'll also watch for ebook sales on cookbooks because I like having physical and digital copies of my favorites). It's really helped keep things organized, and having it on my phone means that if we make last minute meal I have the recipes with me.
Yes - great point, Eva!
I never knew I had so many thoughts and opinions about this topic until I listened to this episode. Great one, Anne and Melody!
Part of the reason that food blogs have all that life story that we have to scroll through to get to the recipe is because I believe there's a copyright rule that a recipe alone is not copyrightable but your life story part is, so if you just post recipes on your blog, they're not copyrightable unless they have that life story attached to them. Either way, I'm so grateful for the jump to recipe button, haha.
Secondly, I wanted to offer an idea that my partner and I had earlier this year. We're combining two households, as this is a second marriage (essentially - we're not yet married) for both of us, and we both have a little bit of a hoarder tendency. So our recipe collections, which were in binders, were overflowing with magazine cut outs and print outs and even newspaper clippings, in addition to the cookbooks that we had amassed over the years. And so we decided to do something called Recipe Night! (The exclamation mark is essential.) We put it in our calendar, and then on the night we had set aside, we poured wine (liberally) and each of us went through our recipe collections, letting go of anything that wasn't an "OMG I CAN'T WAIT TO MAKE THIS FOR YOU!" recipe. And then the VERY slimmed down collections were merged into one binder. It was really fun and exciting to be reminded of our favorite recipes.
Now, maybe once a month, we pull out the binder and pick a few" new" recipes that we want to make that month, along with the usual quick meals that are standard in our household. We also keep occasional print outs and magazine cut outs on the corkboard in our kitchen, as our "hey, remember we wanted to try this?" queue.
I LOVE THIS
(Okay, real talk - getting this comment felt like I did years ago, when running coat check for a very fancy perfume launch at the Guggenheim, where I didn't blink seeing and interacting with A-list celebrities but then lost my shit internally when a couple of my favorite fashion bloggers showed up. SQUEEEEEE AHP loved my post!!!)
That’s so fun!!
It's funny, reflecting on this, is that while I identify certain food traditions in my family very strongly, we are very much not a "pass down a recipe" people. There ARE recipes that are written down, but they are treated almost more like historical curiosities. My great-grandmother wrote down some recipes but they're full of measurements like "a soup bowl of flour" and "the 10 cent jar of mustard" and whatnot. And there's a written recipe for pasta sauce that says "3 T cinnamon" which, if it indeed means 3 Tablespoons of cinnamon, is a frankly ludicrous quantity of cinnamon for the amount of tomato, PLUS I am sure her Southern Italian peasant forebears did not use spices in that quantity.
We are very much "measure with your heart" people, I guess. We don't pass down recipes so much as the set of tips and tricks that various family members have innovated and we take or leave. Very little is written down, and if it is it's because someone collected the recipe from some other source back when "copying it onto a recipe card and sticking it in a box" was the most reliable way to save a recipe. (I asked my grandmother once for her recipe for pumpkin log and she told me she just used the one from the Libby's can! So I made one and it tasted just like I remembered. :D )
So while I think about my family's holiday food traditions, for example, and like to have lasagna on the table at Christmas, I'm not making my grandmother's lasagna. I'm making MY lasagna, but I'm thinking of her. I know how my dad's sauce gets the particular flavor that makes it his and when I want that, I know which brand of cheap jug wine to go buy to achieve it, but most of the time I'm just making sauce my way. When someone asks me how to make something of mine, I'm usually giving them the "this is less a recipe than a game plan" speech.
For recipes my spouse and I add to our repertoire, usually that happens one of two ways:
- We think of something we want to make, and then read a bunch of recipes for it to get a sense of how it works, and cobble something together like that.
- We find a recipe that sounds interesting from a trusted source (Smitten Kitchen, Cook's Illustrated, whatever), make it more or less as written once or twice, and then over time the "measure with your heart" takes over and it becomes a flexible method.
I love reading cookbooks like novels, honestly. I learn a lot. I've got a Thomas Keller French Laundry cookbook that I am NEVER going to cook from but WOW do I love reading it.
The recipe most passed down and shared in my family is for my great-great grandma’s relish. It’s excellent on grilled cheese (and any other) sandwiches, baked ham, and more. As a child I ate it by the spoonful, which was my mother’s signal that it was time for me to learn how much effort went into the process of making it: two days, much food processing, several hours of stirring and ladling and water bath canning. It’s been shared around the family and with close friends, and then, a number of years ago, my mom submitted an essay to the local paper in response to a question about family recipes, so it’s never been particularly gatekept. (I can’t find the link right now but will come back and add it!)
How do we hang on to the recipe? My mom’s copy lives in a binder full of great recipes, with all sorts of handwritten notes added over the years. Mine is a photocopy of hers from after I moved out and wanted to make it on my own for the first time. I have been known to text her in the middle of the process when I half-remember a step that doesn’t appear to be written down because everyone used to just know that’s how it was done, or to brainstorm updates (I don’t have a gravy maker to shake up the water/flour mix, but I do have a protein shaker cup!).
Anyway tl;dr is that I’m excited to listen to this episode and hear about other family recipes here in the comments!
Ugh apparently the paper's archives are paywalled, so I can't share a link. Bummed!
I struggle with keeping family recipes because my mom will just list out ingredients and say to put them in "when it feels right" or "until it tastes good" because her recipes are developed from a lot of practice and intuition that doesn't translate well to explaining to me!
This is 100% how cooking works in our family. There's no recipe, there's just, "Oh, I make stuffed cabbage like anyone else, except I use V8 juice in the cooking liquid." "It's just the Toll House recipe for chocolate chip cookies, but I put in an extra quarter cup of flour." "I use celery salt and dried parsley in the city chicken breading, just until it tastes like I remember."
This is also how my partner's mother cooks! We often try to get her to elaborate—"but how much sour cream?" "Oh, until it's the right colour/consistency!" Her cooking is fabulous and I hope we can figure out a way to learn from her!
I use the Plan to Eat app for recipe organization and I love it. I haven’t used Paprika so I can’t compare but PTE is well worth the $50 a year subscription.
Every time I cook something and it turns out well, I take a photo of it and store it in a cooking album on my iPhone. Then, when I’m making a shopping list on a Sunday and planning meals for the week, I scroll through the album for inspiration. This especially helps if you’re stumped on what to cook. Scrolling through an album of things you’ve already made, that you know are within your skill set and most importantly, *taste good*, is so much more accessible than scrolling a recipe app/book/blog (in my opinion). It’s also just kind of fun to scroll back and look at all the meals you’ve made. I struggle with managing my appetite and find it to be a bit all over the place, and being a visual person as well means that this album really helps kick my appetite into gear. It’s like my eyes are attached to my stomach lol.
I used to be much more adventurous in my cooking but since having 2 kids I have sort of fallen back on my midwestern roots - lots of comfort foods, casseroles that we eat for days, meat + carb + vegetable, etc. It's actually been lovely to look at my plate and see the exact type of meal that my mom used to make growing up (recent example was fish sticks, mashed potatoes, & frozen peas - real gourmet stuff).
I have used Evernote to organize my recipes for years - occasionally I'll look around to see if there's a better alternative, but haven't found one that I like yet. (Paprika seems great but is a little too restrictive for me - I like to be a little more open-ended in what I do with my notes.) The web clipper lets you add stuff directly from your browser, and then I use tags for dish type (main, salad, etc.), key ingredients, dietary restrictions, family recipes, etc. (I should note - Evernote was really heading downhill a few years ago but has recently been acquired by a new company and is *fantastic* again.)
I also have to shout out the Supercook site/app (https://www.supercook.com/) - put in all the ingredients you have around your house and it will churn out a bunch of ideas for how to use them. The recipes themselves aren't always great - they're just scraped from random internet sites - but it is helpful in generating ideas.
I'm a fellow Evernote user for recipes! (and other random stuff, which is why it seems like more work than it's worth to look into a recipe-specific app) I know people were mad when they started charging last year, but I figure I got a decade of free use out of it and I have literally thousands of notes, so it makes sense to pay for something I use every single day. Saving the Supercook link - thanks!
I have a different analog and digital solution from what was mentioned in the episode.
I have a Moleskine recipe notebook that I use to write down my favourites recipes. I have been carrying it through all my moves and adding to it for 15+ years. I write down the source of each recipes (including “mom’s recipe”, but with conversion from “a bit of this” to “1 teaspoons”…) and modifications/simplifications I’ve made to them over the years, it’s a bit tedious to manually write down from website/cookbooks/etc, but I like that I can adjust the format to how I like for ease of cooking and it’s tidy. That notebook would be one of the first things I would try to save if my house was on fire.
I also have a shared note on iPhone with my partner of all the weeknight-friendly favourite recipes. Really helps when one of us ask “what do you want to do for dinner?” (With photos from the relevant page from above notebook also saved, so that a trip to the grocery store after work is easy!)
This episode brought up a lot of feelings in me. My mom cooked every day when I was growing up, utilizing food as a creative outlet. Many of the dishes I had as a kid were Puerto Rican staples, but she often threw in her own favorites, like Swedish meatballs or lasagna.
She’s dying of cancer as I type this. There’s so much I’ll miss about her, but especially the love and care she brought to everything she prepared.
So as a mom, I was always a weekly dinner planner, if for no other reason than I didn’t want to hit multiple grocery stores multiple times a week. I also get easily bored, so each week I am probably making something I have never made before mixed in with current favs and old reliables, mostly from food blogs and cookbooks. But the internet and my memory is not as forever as one might hope, so my system evolved into menu planning is recorded on a google calendar and everyone else who will be home that night get either invited or the event is copied on to their calendar. The main and sides are the event, and the cookbook or web address are entered as location. Eventually the bests gets copied/pasted or typed into a google doc so it is searchable, sharable and legible. Now I just need a tagging system for things besides ingredients, like seasons, hot weather etc
Any other ANYLIST app users out there?! I’ve been using for years and years. It lets you import from most blogs and sites (as long as their html is standard) or input recipes by hand and then you can create collections, add notes and best of all add ingredients you need to buy at the store - including how much so you never get there and aren’t sure if you needed 2 or 4 boxes of butter for all your thanksgiving recipes combined! You can pin recipes to a calendar, share the subscription with your household and also use it for other kinds of lists (packing! Costco! Etc). I will check out paprika but I think I have over 300 recipes saved in AnyList at this point. I can search - artichokes and spinach- and find 10 ideas for what to make with them. Only downside is I never crack open paper cookbooks of which I have many. 😞 if the AnyList app developers ever shut it down I will cry. I almost did when google stopped supporting me yelling “hey google, add kosher salt to the shopping list”but I’ve somehow survived.
I love AnyList, but I don’t use it for recipes, just lists. The shared grocery list is the reason I keep paying the annual fee. In theory, it means whenever someone enters a grocery store they should look at the list and see if there’s anything else they need to pick up. In practice, the kids and even the husband don’t always look, but I remain hopeful.
I love it when recipes tell you ahead of time what tools you need, so I can get everything out ahead of time and make sure I actually have what’s required.
I know I'm late to the discussion, but I'm surprised not to see any comments from people who save recipes the way I do. For online recipes that I want to try, I bookmark them. I have a Recipes bookmark folder, and then a bunch of subfolders in categories that makes sense to me. For favorite seasonal ingredients, those recipes are in their own folders so that when I have those ingredients I can quickly peruse all the related recipes (examples include: Pumpkin, Apples, Strawberries). I also have folders for situations: Breakfast, Dinner (broken down by Beef, Poultry, Pork, and Vegetarian), Tea Ideas (for afternoon teas with my sisters).
Once I try a recipe, it gets added to a spreadsheet I've been keeping for a few years. I will link the recipe or list the cookbook, categorize it (cookie, main dish, breakfast, bread, etc), include the cuisine style (Italian, Indian, American, etc), how easy it was (from super easy to a bit involved to difficult), whether I would make it again (Absolutely, Yes, Maybe, Definitely Not), How good it was (delicious, good, bad), and then notes with things like whether I swapped any ingredients, improvements I should make next time, which type of apples were used, etc. This spreadsheet has basically become my personal bible, and due to the ease of filters, I can quickly pull up recipes that I may have forgotten about to cook again.
I don't have a lot of passed down recipes, and I wish I had more. This episode reminded me that my grandpa's obituary actually mentioned his chocolate chip cookies and apple pie winning prizes at local fairs, but I've never come across recipes specifically noted as his. Perhaps I should look into this... Personally, I never gatekeep recipes for food I've shared and people have liked, because I see no point in not sharing the wealth!
I had wanted to ask this question for the episode but didn't get my stuff together in time - how often does anyone make a recipe they see on Instagram or otherwise solely in video form? I know I'm totally old school and still mostly get my recipes from food blogs I started following in the late 00s, but if I can't copy or save a simple ingredient/instruction list to my recipe collection, chances are I'm never going to make it. Even more so if the poster makes you comment to get any info!