To think that I am a very sad human being but I'm going to ask anyway....

[stillawip]

Hi everyone,
I have lots of cookbooks, and whenever I have something to use up in the fridge, I would like to be able to go straight to a recipe in one of my books that uses that ingredient. Or, if I want to cook a particular dish (say apple pie), I want to be able to find out quickly which of my books have a recipe for apple pie in, rather than trawling them all. So, being the sad human being that I am, some years ago I started to make an index on Microsoft Excel of all the recipes in my favourite books, and then categorising them under appropriate headings (so for apple pie it would appear if I looked under 'Apples', 'Desserts - Sweet pies' and 'Desserts - Fruit' ) thus making it easy for me to search. The list has now grown like Topsy & I would love to know how to automate what I am doing a bit more, but I don't know what that would be called!! How could I do that?

Do I need a catalogue function? An index? A drop-down list? Any ideas?!

YABU - you are a very sad human being and you should go & lie down in a darkened room for at least a year.
YANBU - this is a genius idea & here's my suggestion

I have done pretty much the same thing as this - so not sad at all!! I use a google sheets so I can access it on my phone, iPad and computer (easier to enter them on the computer but search on the iPad)

I have the name of the book, recipe, page number, what type of food (starter, main course, dessert, sauce etc), main ingredient, cuisine (if appropriate) and notes. I even have a rating where DH and I rate them out of 10.

Each on of these columns has a filter on it so I can narrow down an Italian style, beef main course.......I may have over engineered it a little, but spreadsheets are my happy place!

Oh no, don’t be sad! I have lots of lovely friends but there’s always room for another one! 💕💕

This sounds fab, but unfortunately I also use Google sheets for work, & the last time I tried to do something for my personal use on Google sheets I managed to share my birthday list, my daughter’s birthday list and the guest list for my late father-in-law’s funeral with my work colleagues, so I’m not going there again!!!

This is right, OP.

If you were doing it in Excel you would have a row for each of your recipes and a column for each of your ingredients. So you'd add "Bubble and Squeak" to the next row at the bottom, then you'd scan across to find the columns headed "onion" "cabbage" "potato" and put a tick in each of these. You'd then add an "autofilter" so when you were faced with a cabbage on its final legs, you look along to the cabbage column, click on the down arrow at the top and choose "show non-blanks" or "show √" and it would just show those recipes with cabbage in them.

If you didn't use the filter, you would see your Excel spreadsheet was a huge table with lots of blanks and a few ticks here and there.

If you did it in Access (database) instead, your basic data would be a list of recipes and a list of ingredients, and some pointers between them. You wouldn't be storing all those blank cells, Entry would be easier, you'd add a new recipe "bubble and squeak" then choose "onion" "cabbage" "apple" from a drop down probably alphabetical list, typing just the first few letters to get to the ingredient you wanted. You'd also set up a report generator so you could select the ingredient or ingredients you were interested in, and get a list of the recipes showing which other ingredients they used.

It's also a bit less easy to mess up your data. For example, in Excel, you could sort all your recipes into alphabetical order, but manage to omit the last few columns in the data to be sorted. So if the last column was "blackberry", after sorting it would still be in its original position, instead of being carried along with the recipe it belonged to.

But all these benefits come at the cost of having to teach yourself how to use Access. Which is why I have some scarily large databases masquerading as Excel spreadsheets.

But what I do for this particular problem is google, eg "cabbage onion recipe". Or even "overripe banana recipe".

This is amazing! I can only dream of veing so organised but I love it!

I've always wondered why nobody can produce something like this. I'm a shit cook and anything that would help me use things up that is simple would be a godsend.

I just google recipes.

But that isn't what the OP wants to do @Bouledeneige! She wants to catalogue/make a database of the recipes she already has, in the cookbooks that she owns.

BBC good food used to do this, years ago. You could put up to three ingredients in, and it would suggest a recipe. No idea why they got rid of it, it was great!

I have >400 cool books and would freaking love this <dreamy sigh>