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I have many cookbooks, cooking magazines and recipes on-line. But I also have even more handwritten recipes, recipes i have printed out and recipes I have in word on my computer. Often I have reprinted the recipes from my computer because I've missplaced the original print-out. I really would like to get all my recipes in one place instead of in file cabinet that I have to leaf through.

Another dilema I have is counter space. Although I would love to just bring my laptop in the kitchen when I cook there just isn't enough room on my counters. I'm thinking an Ipad may be the way to go.

Also, recently I have started moving some of my on-line bookmarked recipes to Pinterest and have found the visual cue helpful.

What I would like to know is:

How do you organize all of your recipes?

Do you still use handwritten recipes or have you loaded them onto your computer? If you have loaded these onto your computer did you scan them or type them in? Did you just use word or do you use a special site for your own recipes? There are some places where you can make your very own cookbooks, have any of you done that? 

Often I find on-line recipes and make changes. The only way I can think of noting those changes is printing the recipe out and noting it on the paper or copying the recipe into word and making the changes there. Is there another way?

Do any of you use a journal in the kitchen to note recipes that you have made up or altered...LOL...or do you just use scraps of paper like me that get missplaced :)? Do you then transcribe those recipes and notes to your computer?

Do any of you use an I-pad in the kitchen? I'm starting to think this might be the easiest way for me to store most recipes. It also can be protected by my cookbook holder.

Are any of you afraid of losing all the recipes you have on your computer?

I'm sure I'll have many more questions once I hear your responces. But I'm just sick of all the scraps of paer and missplaced recipes. 

Thanks in advance for your help.

Cati and others interested in iPad use in the kitchen: You can go to Settings>General>Auto-Lock and set auto-lock to Never to make it easier to use your recipes.

I do use my iPad for recipes, or even better, referring to photo sequences or video for techniques as I attempt something unfamiliar. I use Evernote on the iPad for collecting online recipes in one place. If it is a recipe on Epicurious, though, I mostly don't bother saving it to Evernote, too.

But I am an unabashed paper user. I have handwritten recipes from relatives and friends, or which I collected when visiting other places. I have clippings and pages torn from magazines. I have cryptic notes on cocktail napkins noting down ingredients to try recreating at home. 

Although I am no where near as organized as Cati sounds, once a year at Christmas, I go through that year's accumulation of scraps of paper. Cull the ones that no longer sound appealing and tape or glue the keepers to index cards that go into loose-leaf binders. The loose-leaf binders are sorted by category and within the category, the most used recipes usually end up at the beginning of the section.

The loose-leaf binders also get the printouts of online recipes which I have cut and pasted into Word. In Word format, I've also got a collection of recipes, mostly gathered from online sources or from email, carefully migrated from PC to PC over the last 15 years. Any time I transcribe a recipe in order to email it someone else, I save it on the PC so that I will never have to transcribe it again.

Wrt to the iPad: When I had a small notebook computer, I still didn't enjoy using it in the kitchen -- not only the risk from spills and gunky fingers, but I find it easier to read from printed paper, and infinitely easier to make notes.  But I gather there are all kinds of stands and covers for the kitchen iPad, so that may not apply.  It's a pretty expensive solution, though.

My general method is this: recipes that aren't in my cookbooks or in the shoebox files inherited from my mother are all on my computer, in one directory.  I back them up regularly onto a thumb drive (which keeps me from worrying about losing them all at once).  When I try a new one out, I print it out.  As I cook, and even more afterwards, I make notes and revisions.  Then [in the ideal world] I enter the revised recipe on the computer, and save it to a 'made' directory.  If it's one that I plan to make again, I print out the revised version and add it to a three-ring binder (where the recipes are in plastic page protectors). 

I don't often clip from magazines or papers or catalogs.  When I do, I apply the same method: if it's a keeper, I enter the revised/annotated version in my recipe directory, and print out a copy for the binder.

I'm always behind on entering the revised, tried-out recipes.  But -- and this is the key -- I keep those all in a kitchen notebook, taped to the pages, and I made a 'table of contents' in the front of the notebook so that I can go back to them easily.  Once I find myself going back for the second or third time to the same scribbly page, that's my signal to sit down and get it entered so I can put a copy in the more durable binder.  The notebook also makes it easier to enter a batch of tried-out recipes, as they're all in one place.

So one place to start, with a lot less overhead than a new machine, would be to try taping your pieces of paper into one notebook.  That way they're easy to flip through and easy to make notes about.  If you number the pages, you can make a rough 'table of contents' that will help you find one more quickly.  And you can keep adding them to the notebook as you find them stuck in between cookbook pages, in drawers, etc. (I've been there!)

That might be enough organization to get over the hurdle of "where IS that recipe?"  It also makes it easy to add them to EYB as personal recipes (maybe even including their page numbers in your taped-in notebook).

There are quite a lot of recipe software programs available - I've been using 'Now You're Cooking' (http://www.ffts.com/info.htm) for many years. It lets you enter recipes manually, copy and paste (import) from the web, import from other programs - if you scan a written recipe (so text is recognised), you can import these as well (though may need to edit)). Most software lets you add notes (when you've cooked it, changes you'd make, etc), add keywords, indicate where you got the recipe from, etc. Easy to back up on a thumb drive.

The software I use won't work on an iPad, though there are probably similar apps available. I've used a tablet (Samsung) in kitchen for recipes on the web and it works great.

I also have some scans of old recipes (e.g., handwritten by grandparent, mother) - I scan them into a pdf document. If I get organised, I guess I could merge these together into one document.