Great way to keep recipes

This is another rehash of something I learned here a long time ago.

I'm going to attribute this to Cynthia Wenslow... I hope I'm not wrong because I'm too lazy right now to look it up.

Gmail. Create an account just for recipes. When I find one online I just copy and past into an email. The email subject is the title of the recipe.

Then I use gmail's label feature to tag each recipe with: Main Beef, Main Lamb, Soup, etc. You can filter all recipes by category.

If you want to, you could share username and password and have a collective recipe "database."

Quite a few of my goodies have been culled from this board.

I paste all the recipes I find online in one MSWord file. It is in book form has a table of contents. I just click on a recipe in the TOC and it jumps to the page. It's over 160 pages now.

I have a folder called "recipes". I put one recipe, in plain text, in its own file and name the file the same as the recipe (plus ".txt"). Very easy to search, sort, print, etc.

I like that I can access my recipe "file" from any computer anywhere (I routinely use 3 in different locations) and my cell phone. And I can click any label to instantly see all of my recipes that match the category. And no backup worries. At least as long as Google doesn't screw up.

At one point in time I wrote a recipe software program and even started to market it. For some reason I simply abandoned the project. Now days I do pretty much like Jeff does except on an expanded basis.

Recipes almost beg for notations and a simple text file gives you that feature most abundantly. Initially all new recipes go into a folder labeled... recipe possibilities. I generally will have 20 or more sub folders under this folder to classify whatever category I want to highlight. Also individual recipes not classified will simply be listed in this folder.

Once a recipe has been tested it either is sent to the trash file (most wind up here) or it makes it to a Recipe = add to file folder where I do another breakdown this time mostly by type of recipe... entree, dessert, etc.

Finally when I get the time the recipes make their way into my website... a slow process I might add. These days I delete a lot of recipes simply because I know I will never make them again.

Tim