WFMW: Organizing Recipes

When I was spending my last Christmas at home before going to college, my mother handed me a treasured gift. She gave me a metal box full of recipes that over the years I had enjoyed or ones that she thought I would enjoy in the future. Among those recipes were ones from my both of my grandmothers, my great grandmothers and friends of my mom. As I began to cook on my own, I added recipes from in-laws, friends, and magazines. Now that I am on the web all of the time, I am picking up yummy recipes here.

So back over the summer, I began a project. I didn't want to have to copy a recipe every time someone wanted one and I wanted to pass on the legacy that my mom had given me to those in my own family. So I set down and put every recipe I had into Microsoft Word. I sorted them by types of dishes (appetizers, drinks, desserts, pork, poultry, etc) into their own folder. Then I burned my recipe folder onto CDs and gave one to my stepsons, gave one to my mom, my stepmother and I have given several away as gifts. Currently there are about 500 recipes in my file. To add new recipes, I pull them out of magazines and add them periodically to my file. When I burn my next disk, they will be included. The one thing I hadn't figured out what to do with was recipes I ran across while blogging.