Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Recipes and Getting Organized

Hello Everyone,

Back in, hmm, maybe June or July? I had the lofty goal of getting my recipes organized and ready to use so that I wouldn't spend forever looking for them and wasting my time when I could be cooking. (Oh my goodness, if I could only tell you how irate it makes me hunting for something when I could be DOING something? I value my time even more now that I have less of it to myself. Having a baby is hard. It's still hard. It will always be hard. Tangent over.)

We moved in with my parents-in-law and not having things at my fingertips is a little frustrating. So even though I had put a lot of my recipes into Word documents ready to be accessed, those Word documents (and my trusty recipe book) are sitting in a storage unit that is about an hour round-trip drive away. And since gas costs money and I really need to curtail my driving because we have no inflowing cash resources, I don't know if I'm going to get to go there anytime soon. I have put the kibosh on my driving long distances because we are poor and getting poorer every day.

Luckily it's not too bad. I have forwarded a lot of recipes as emails so they are floating around in my sent mail folder. But I still have to hunt for them. And sometimes they can't be found, because they never got sent in an email to begin with! (Curse you, false memories!)

So my new brilliant plan is to use an ancient technology I've known about since 2008. Good old Google Docs to the rescue. I'm going to put my recipes into there, alphabetically, to save my sanity. Hooray! And I invite you to do the same. Or some form of it. To bring sanity to your life. Seriously, am I the only one hunting down things and then getting frustrated that I had to spend a lot of time looking for the item? You could do it with other things that you want at your fingertips, things that won't go away if you computer hard drive crashes or goes into storage.

I also hope to be putting more recipes into my recipe blog: http://danellesrecipes.blogspot.com/

Danelle's Recipes and Adventures In Cooking

but that hasn't happened just yet, and it still can take some hunting around in the blog posts. I want it all laid out like a scroll for me and my happy brain that craves a little more organization in my life. Mm mm good!

Google Docs Tutorial

Feel free to steal my idea. That's kind of the whole point of me telling you about it.

-Danelle

2 comments:

Elizabeth said...

You're definitely not the only one! My recipes aren't very organized either and I've been wanting to get them together. Things have been crazy this semester with my job, and I feel like I can't even remember what I *like* to cook when I need to search for the recipes. I'm going to try and get them more organized too!

Danelle said...

Yay Elizabeth! Too bad about being so busy with your job. When things slow down, hopefully it will be a rewarding use of your time. And I'm glad to report that I spent some time just getting recipes out of my email into Google Docs (literally cut-and-paste, so quick and easy!) and I probably have 75% of my favorite recipes ready to go! Hooray! The others I'll have to get when our computer's back out of storage.