My Recipes

Created in January 31, 2025

2025   ·   recipes,   organization   ·   resources

TLDR; Here is a link to my recipes.

Recipe Organization

While I’m told that I make tasty food, I am not an exceptional cook. But, I have tried a lot of recipes. On top of that, I’ve built myself an easy, multi-faceted way to search through my recipes, and I can often do a good job of selecting recipes that match any occasion and the amount of time and energy I’m prepared to spend.

Making Recipes Searchable

My recipe organization is built using a Notion database. The key features are:

  • making recipes searchable
  • making recipes sortable, and
  • associating tags with my recipes.

You’ll see that among other details, I record the name, link, and personal rating for the recipes in my collection. This makes it easy to find a specific recipe, sort by those I like best, or select a recipe from a subset quickly.

Categorization

I try to tag recipes with descriptive words like: Salad, Easy, Stew, etc. This makes it easy to search recipes by the type of food I want to make. As an example, here, during the New England winter, I often search for “soup” and pick. Depending on time, energy, and preference, I’ll choose something that I know my family likes or something we haven’t tried yet.

Custom Tags

I often make food using what I have on hand, rather than selecting a recipe and shopping for every ingredient. Because of this, I also have an important ingredients column, which includes ingredients that are uncommon in my kitchen (e.g., heavy cream). It serves 2 purposes:

  • First, it helps me determine whether or not I can make a recipe at a moment’s glance. For example, if I want to make muhammara, then I need pomegranite molasses–do I have any in the house?
  • Second, if I have an uncommon ingredient that I want to use up, I can quickly find the other recipes that make use of it. For example, if I have powdered sage, perhaps I should make some chicky seitan.

Finding New Recipes

I come across new recipes very often. These recipes come from:

  • friends who like to cook
  • my favorite food blogs (e.g., The Kitchn)
  • daily emails (e.g., The Morning), or
  • recipe books I’ve checked out from the library.

When a recipe sparks my interest, I’ll add a recipe link (or photo from a book) to my recipes and rate it 🤷, which represents a recipe I’ve not yet tried. When I want to try something new (which is often), I’ll deliberately search for and select from these recipes.

Improving Always

My list of recipes is always evolving! I’m constantly adding new recipes, rating recipes I’ve tried, and tweaking the various columns of the list.

If you’ve got some ideas for improvements, let me know!

Happy cooking!