A Work In Progress
I like to think that I am a fairly organized person. Especially in the kitchen. However, when it comes to recipes, I can't seem to keep it together.
In fact, I think by trying to categorize and catalog the recipes I've amassed over the years, I've somehow made things worse, and less organized.
Before I even started recording recipes in notebooks I used individual notecards. Why I did this, I couldnt tell you. It may have been something I was told to do in culinary school, but I just can't get down with the loosey-goosey nature of notecards.
There may be gold in these, but they will inevitably sit untouched and unused until my master consolidation plan is complete.
Once I actually started cooking in restaurants, and in my first attempt to stay ultra organized, I would keep a small recipe book that could ONLY be used for the recipes of the specific station I was currently working.
That actually works really well in the moment, but years later with tiny notebooks scattered among boxes and bookshelves, I wish I had developed a more condensed system.
And that's what I tried to do next...but it's actually worse.
My next recipe era came when I started having a hand in developing recipes that would (hopefully) end up on the menu.
My notebook now had to be bigger, because I was righting down recipe notes, like what worked, what didn't, and the multiple iterations of a dish before it was menu ready.
Not to mention the minutiae of managing a kitchen.
These books are fun to look back on, but actually sorting through and locating "finished" recipes is as clear as mud.
Finally, there was/is my attempt at creating a digital library of recipes. But again, in an attempt to keep things organized, I've only made things harder.
I have folders for different restaurants, all with subfolders for what station each recipe came from. Not to mention A LOT of unlabled photos of recipes that I snapped with my phone.
I'm basically right back where I started, only now, the tiny notebooks are dispersed across my computer.
With all of that out of the way, my project of the moment (and for the last 5 years and foreseeable future) is to consolidate and condense all of the "good" recipes into one location. Well, actually three locations. I'm doing it again, aren't I...
- A nice handwritten book, because it's nice to cook from an actual book.
- One digital folder that can live in the cloud (wherever that is) for eternity.
- A recipe index here for all of you lovely people.
Hopefully reading that wasn't like eating a bunch of really dry cornbread just because you don't want to be rude to the person who made it.
Do you have a recipe system that works well, or do people not keep recipes anymore because you can just google it everytime?
In other news, I made a very good cheeseburger this week.
