How do you store your recipes?

[BookShark]

So at the moment, I've got lots of recipe books, plus a lever arch folder with recipes from magazines etc. But because I tend to meal plan at the last minute, I don't have time to go through all the books and so just end up cooking the same things on a regular basis.

There must be a better way to store them - maybe online, with tags against them for main ingredients, cooking time etc. - a bit like the BBC food website filters. Has anyone come across such a thing? Bonus points if it will also put together a shopping list for you.

I'm happy to spend time uploading photos, or typing out recipes, just don't know the best way to do it! I did try and save weekly meal plans with a shopping list per week, which sort of works, but still means I'm repeating the same things every few weeks and I'd rather be able to think "I fancy a chicken pasta of some sort" and then filter to those recipes.

Thanks in advance!

It's not quite what you're after, but I use eatyourbooks.com to get organised.
You upload the book titles you own, then you can search by ingredient, chef, cuisine, etc & you get a list of recipes - complete with all major ingredients.

You can also search for on-line recipes .
It's very sophisticated, you can search for e.g. chicken and pasta no onions and Marcus Wareing.

I think i pay about £30 p.a. , but there's a limited free version to try before deciding.
All my books (c.100) are indexed, apart from some very old, niche ones.

I was going to recommend eatyourbooks too, essential for anyone who owns lots of cookbooks. You add magazines too I believe.

I either search for recipes based on what I fancy this week (eg want to try a new fish recipe or make a curry) or ingredients I need to use up.

You can also bookmark recipes so if you’re flicking through a cookbook and see things you’d like to make one day you can save it on the site for when you’re looking to try something new.

Thanks both - and apologies for the delay in replying.

I did try eatyourbooks years ago but couldn't find most of my books on there, and if seemed quite US-focused. I wonder if I was just a bit early to the party - I'll go and have another look.

Thank you!

I’ve just checked and I have 300 cookbooks loaded onto my profile and 260 of them are indexed. There doesn’t seem to be any particular theme to the ones that aren’t indexed but they do have fewer members who have added them to their library. So assuming that most of your cookbooks are fairly mainstream, there should be a decent percentage on there.

I always think of the annual fee as the cost of one cookbook and justify it to myself that way as for the price of one book I get value from the other 250!

One of my lockdown projects was to cut all the recipes I wanted out of cookery magazines which I had about the house and catalogue them using Microsoft Excel. Then you can use the find and select function to search it. It's something I've kept up after lockdown. I have 14 books!