Handwritten recipes hold a special place in family history, and nothing will ever replace the pockmarked cookbooks that have been worn with love for many years. But nowadays with less time to cook, so comes less time to search for what you want when you want it. Many years ago, I began storing my recipes on databases accessible online, and I never looked back. You can format and customize them with notes from experience, and include pictures and keywords that will help you find them in an instant. Below, you’ll find a summary of few different services, we’ll call them “platforms”, which are uniquely suited to recipe storage on your tablet, mobile phone, or computer.

Recipe Storage Platforms

• One Note- This Microsoft offering is like a binder on your computer. There is an option you can access in your browser, but you can also download the platform directly to your Desktop. With color-coded tabs, and tabs within each tab, you can organize recipes to your heart’s delight. It is also very collaborative, allowing multiple people to access the content and edit it with color-coordinated text.

PROS: collaborative, automatically copies hyperlinks to web pages when you paste from internet sources. You can use it on your mobile phone, and even if your internet is not working, you can access recipe content in One Note; it just won’t sync with other collaborators until an internet connection is established.

CONS: the program takes a bit more time to load and sync if you’re using it across devices; additionally, compared to the other platforms, One Note is not easily searchable for keywords, such as “pasta” to pull up all recipes containing the word “pasta”.

• Google Drive/Docs- This is my preferred mode of storing recipes. With Google Drive, you organize things by documents (Google Docs) and folders, which you can arrange according to any groupings you desire. For instance, I have created folders to arrange recipes by season, by cuisine-type, and by main ingredient.

PROS: Compatible across many devices (including mobile phones), loads quickly with an internet connection. Google Drive is very search-able, and showcases both text and images nicely in a thumbnail preview of documents. This platform is also good for collaboration, as you can edit recipes at the same time as anyone else and have a log of who changed what when.

CONS: You do not have a built in structure, so you have to create a way of organizing your recipes. Google Drive does require an internet connection to access, unless you download specific items to access offline beforehand.

• Pinterest- This social media site has become a cesspool for food porn, but there are also some really good and innovative recipes. You can save them and follow the recipe writers you like with ease, deepening your access to all sorts of food-based inspiration.

PROS: amazing for people who are visual, Pinterest users often create infographic-style recipes that are easy to understand; you can organize your recipes by boards (instead of tabs, or folders). Most blogs and chefs will have their own Pinterest accounts, so you can have a lot of access to a lot of different types of food. Pinterest is collaborative in the sense that you can easily share boards or posts with friends, and follow recipe developers to see what they come up with next! You can also add your own recipes, or recipes that are not on the site, and see your social media presence increase!

CONS: requires an account and some active participation; finding the recipes themselves usually requires you follow a hyperlink to a separate website. Your account and boards are only available while online.

How to Start Collecting Recipes

Ideally, you’ll type up the recipes you’d like to collect as you find them, but it might take some time to get caught up if you already have a large collection. You might even have many “bookmarked” or “favorited” recipe pages in your browser, or multiple snapshots of recipes you see in magazines. It takes some elbow grease, but spending a bit of time typing and copying your “bookmarked” recipes into one of these platforms will leave you with a fleshed out database in no time.

At this point you may be thinking: “Ok, you’ve convinced me to digitize, but my favorite site has an option to save the recipes right on their website! Why would I create something separate?”

First of all, the recipes you love don’t all come from the same source, and even if they do right now, they may not in the future. Second, what would you do if that beloved site shuts down?! It’s best to have your own separate database of recipes that you can be assured will remain available.

That is not to say you shouldn’t save the source of every recipe you copy. If you copy a recipe from a website to Google Drive or to One Note, having the option to read the original is useful, even if you’ve made notes and changed your saved version. Why? The comments section! Here, you’ll run into people who had the same questions, or who can clue you in to substitutes or tricks that make the recipe work even better.

It’s also a fantastic idea to include images wherever you can, in order to more easily pick out recipes at a glance. Using these tricks to flesh out your recipe collection will make it fun to plan meals and answer that age-old question: “Whats for dinner?”