You may not know this about me, but in addition to being a food nerd, I am also a productivity geek, which means I neatly label my spices, I clean out my refrigerator regularly and I made this kind of embarrassing grocery list template organized around the layout of my local Trader Joe's. (I can totally send you the Word doc if you shop at the TJ's in Silver Lake, just let me know.) So it probably comes as no surprise that I have a system in place for organizing the recipes I find online. It's not perfect, but I thought I'd write it up in case it might help any other food and productivity nerds out there.
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It all starts with Google Reader, the hub of my blog reading and where I am most likely to find a recipe I want to keep for later. If I'm in a hurry, I'll just star the recipe so I'll be able to find it easily later. (Extra credit keyboard shortcut geek tip: Just hit S to star an entry in Google Reader.)
If I have a little more time, I immediately save the recipe in Delicious, tagging it with "recipe" plus a mix of general and specific tags, so I have the ability later to search for either a general category of recipes or a specific main ingredient. When I have a larger chunk of time and the desire to obsessively organize, I go through all my starred items and add the recipes to Delicious. Unstarring an item (geek tip: hit S again) after saving it, tagged neatly, is a wonderfully satisfying feeling, like how it felt to empty your school binder at the end of the year in junior high.
...You're getting a deep look into my psyche here, people. I hope you appreciate it.
Here's where we kick into Mac-specific nerd mode because the best and most convenient aspect of saving recipes in Delicious is that I can look them up with Quicksilver, the application launcher program any good geek should be using on her Mac. (You can read more about Quicksilver here: "Why Quicksilver is Still the Greatest Mac App of All Time.") I just pull up Quicksilver -- with a keyboard shortcut, of course -- and type in any word from the name of the recipe to get a list of saved items with that word. I highlight the recipe, hit Return and the recipe page opens up in a new tab in my browser. Quicksilver is also adaptive, so if every time I search for "lentils" I choose Orangette's flawless lentil salad recipe, that item will begin appearing at the top of the list.
I've also been playing around with Evernote, which goes beyond storing bookmarks, allowing you to copy and paste the actual website content -- helpful in case your recipe comes from a blog that closes up shop -- and save documents, photos and even handwritten notes, so if you go to a party and eat an amazing pavlova, you can ask the hostess to write up the recipe on a napkin and save that alongside a photo you snapped of the dessert wine served at the party. It has the potential to be the ultimate recipe box, but I've only just started using it and have yet to reach those heights.
So that's it. Is it all rather underwhelming? Does the idea of accessing a recipe with just two keystrokes and a keyword leave you absolutely cold? Sorry, my friend, it's a geek thing. I like to save time looking up recipes so I have more time to cook. And eat. And, you know, lie around the house rereading the Harry Potter books. Whatever.
Fellow geeks, how do you store your recipes online?
I think I'm gonna go over w/ a jumpdrive and just do a file dump on your MacBook. Would that be easier? Trade you a case of IPA for 'em?