Keeping track of recipes/meal planning

[apintofwine]

Help please hive mind!

Every Sunday I settle down to plan the week’s menus and do the online food shop. This works very well - everyone knows what’s on the planner, we have the correct ingredients in, etc etc

Only problem is thinking of the meals to cook! Every week I find myself sitting with a new page of my notebook with a blank mind. We cook plenty of lovely things, and have often tried new recipes, but I’m in a rut at the moment and find myself uninspired and cycling through the same things each week.

My question: how do you keep track of ALL the recipes? How do you not try something once and then it gets forgotten? Do you have a paper list of everything, a spreadsheet, a note on your phone? I feel like I’ve tried all of these and nothing really sticks.

I think one of the biggest problems is I’ll see a recipe online so it’s lost/forgotten quite easily….

I have the same problem.I made some great meals but can never remember where I found the recipe to make it again.
I keep saying I will get a notebook and write down the recipe and where it’s from but I never get round to it.

I've got a recipe book. It's an A4 notebook and I either cut out recipes from magazines, print out online recipes and glue them in, or write them in by hand. There's quite a few recipes I've never cooked but lots more recent ones I've added that we cook regularly.

I went the old fashioned way and bought a blank recipe book to write them all in as I find them.

I have well over 200 cook books and magazines.
How i meal plan varies but often I'll decide on a particular cook book and concentrate on that for a week so jot down the meals I want to make.

Other times I'll get a few books out and flick through and see what receipe catches my eye I'll make a note of the receipe, which book and page number and what day i want to make it.

Other times I'll have themes so it might be a Mediterranean week, Indian or Japanese week!
I like to have a rough plan.

I keep saying I will get a notebook and write down the recipe and where it’s from but I never get round to it.
Until you get a note book why not keep a note on 'notes' on your phone? I use that quite a lot, also if i see something on insta or tik tok I send it to myself as a WhatsApp message to come back to.

It sounds like the old fashioned way is the winner, and I think I agree - I’m not going to go and sit in my study and consult a spreadsheet!

My problem is that I don’t have a printer, and don’t have the time or inclination to be copying out recipes from the internet! Perhaps a cheap printer and a shiny new printer is the answer…

I don't! Not everything in life needs tracking. I like the fact that I sometimes suddenly remember a meal that I used to cook a lot, or one that I tried last year, loved and haven't made again. Others will remain forgotten and it doesn't matter. Every week is a mix of regular favourites and the odd new thing and something batch-cooked out of the freezer.

I have a load of recipe books but tbh I hardly ever look at them as it's quicker to look online. I do have a few food people I follow on Instagram and often make their recipes. Oh I do use an app called Stashcook though. You just import online recipes into it and save them like that. It's pretty useful!

I have a note book that I write w/c 18/10 then meals I want Saturday to Friday and where to find them for eg,
monday - sticky salmon bites & rice - Joe wicks insta
Tuesday - chicken kebabs- Facebook recipe saved in food folder
wednesday - chilli - hairy bikers book pg211
that kind of thing - I can then keep looking over past weeks for inspiration and also where to find them

I got a gift of beautiful hardback notebooks for my last birthday and planning to write out/stick in my favourite recipes, like my grandmother did. Found myself trying to remember a TikTok recipe which was fantastic but now gone forever as I didn’t save it :(

I tend to get most recipes online, screenshot them and add to the notes on my phone

I have a folder in my photos where I take photos of physical recipes from books, magazines, hello fresh’s that I liked etc.

For digital recipes I use an app called ReciMe which enables you to export most recipes from online into the app so you can keep them in one place. Some don’t work, like if it was an insta video, but it saves the link so I can view the image and title and click to go direct to the insta video instead of rifling through saved videos on instagram which is time consuming and annoying.

I have a digital list that I try to update (but do forget) of recipes I've liked. It tends to be new recipes rather than staples I've cooked for decades.

It is a bit of a labour of love though as I batch the dishes up - so for example there is a section on pasta and sections on individual key ingredients so - beef has its own section as does aubergine. I also try to make sure a dish is listed in all its relevant sections - so Ottolenghi's smoky aubergine pasta is listed in both pasta and aubergine.

I do it that way as often I know I want to cook say sweetheart cabbage because its in season/on offer in the supermarket and so I can quickly remind myself what cabbage recipes I like (it is a growing section on my list!)

I use Samsung Food (available on other phones too). I can collect recipes, make meal plans & shopping lists, and make notes. It's really useful.

I’ve got a spreadsheet I made once and not updated, that has all the most common dishes names in there grouped by “pasta”, “pie” etc, and I either know how to cook those or remember which recipe book they’re in as done it so often. I made the spreadsheet for the times when I cba to think yet still want variety across a fortnight.

I like cooking new things on a regular basis, I have some much loved recipe books I return to again and again and I look in the index when I want to make something again. Occasionally I will end up with a recipe off the internet, I now write these into blank spaces in recipe books under a suitable heading, and add them to the index.

For those recipes that catch my eye in magazines (mainly only the Waitrose free paper now) I have a couple of display books - you know the ones that are A4 with plastic sleeves - I cut out the recipe and put in there, one book for savoury and one for sweet.

A friend of mine who’s a great cook types up all recipes she likes and prints them and has them in plastic sleeves in big lever arch files. I guess she made an index too.

I've asked for a personalised recipe book for Christmas so I can spend the first few weeks of the new year pulling together favourite recipes and handed down food memories and getting them into one place. There are things my Mum used to cook that were from memory and I would love to have written them down before she died. I want to make sure our favourites are captured so my children have a record (and so I don't have to remember where I found different recipes!)
There are some good designs on Etsy.

I send them to myself on WhatsApp. Going to look at some of these other suggestions though!