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Discolor Online

Weblog of the sweetest person you never want to piss off.

 

The Recipe Project

In the interest of saving space, I've embarked upon a project. The first step of this new project has been to sit down with years worth of cooking magazines and cut out individual pages of recipes that I like or still want to try. I currently have a four-inch pile of these pages and I've only gone through about half of the Cooking Light issues (with the issues of Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Saveur, Eating Well, Vegetarian Times, or any of the other half dozen titles I've bought over the years).

My next step is a little ways off yet but eventually I'll have to DO something with all these sheets or they'll be no use to me. Originally I thought I might just put the sheets in binders but I'm going to have inches and inches (feet?) of these recipes from magazines and I can't even begin to think of how to organize them all. One of the big problems with saving recipes out of magazines is that there are often recipes that run for more than one page, or recipes on opposite sides of the page that don't go together organizationally (main dish on one side, dessert on the other, frex).

Now I'm reconsidering this plan I'm a bit at sea about what to do. I've been pondering several options for a re-design of Nikchick.com for a year or so. I could try to put all these recipes into a format where they could be saved and searched-for on my recipes page. My feeling is that would be a LOT of manual data entry but I'd probably be happy in the end. I could just put them into some sort of recipe organization program for use on my computer but not as part of my webpage. I have at least three of those programs (each with their own benefits and drawbacks).

I still have a while to go on step one so I have a while to figure out step two. Pasting all these recipes to note cards like I did in high school is not among the options I'm considering.

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Blogger JMcL63 Says:

My way of dealing with recipies from supermarket magazines: a ring binder and plastic page pockets/sleeves. I've got 2 ring binders full of these and recipies printed out from the net. :)

 
 
Blogger Nikchick Says:

Indeed, that was my original plan but looking at the volume of saved recipe pages I'm daunted by the organizational nightmare. Sure I could put them in binders (and I have three binders sitting here as I type) but how will I ever find anything?

Woe is me, huh? ;)

 
 
Anonymous Anonymous Says:

With off-site storage, is it feasible to scan the pages into a big online data dump somewhere?

Spike

 
 
Blogger Paul Tevis Says:

We so need to do this. We have about a four-foot pile to deal with.

 
 
Blogger Steve Says:

How hard would it be to scan them in and run them through an OCR program? As text they shouldn't take up too much virtual space, and they would be available whenever you [or we] need them.

 
 
Blogger jdroth Says:

I type all my recipes into a cheap software program called MacGourmet. It's searchable by ingredient, which makes it great when I've got buttermilk or some other item I need to use up. Kris

 

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