Where do I keep my recipes? In the bookshelf in our kitchen, scattered through several published volumes. My particular favourite is a well-used book the wife wrote.

I prefer recipes on paper - less worries in a working place like the kitchen.
So I have a load of printouts and cutouts from here and there.
I put them into plastic sleeves with punchholes on the side - what the blazes are those called in English? - and then in a binding folder so I can easily take a recipe that doesn't work out, and add ones that do work in.
Divided by colourful bookmark pages so that the cake doesn't end up in between the dinner meals.

Any recipe I try and really enjoy, I write down in a moleskine that I then take with me when I am going to visit people as I invariably end up cooking a meal or two.
I did spend ages going through my old magazines and tearing recipes out and putting them in binders but that got out of hand, too many maybes. If you have to handwrite them into a book, you are more ruthless and only keep the ones you know you will definitely do again.

Went through all my cooking mags and books last year and catelogued all the recipes I thought I might do on an all singing, all dancing, colour coded Excel spreadsheet. You can sort by main ingredient, type of dish and all sorts of wankery.

Was very proud. I have used the spreadsheet at least twice since I completed it. I prefer leafing through the books and magazines.

It was a massive waste of my time.

I read recipes online, then I use google to try to find them again when I want to use them

I stick mine in Evernote or on Springpad. When I'm cooking I display the recipe on my phone which I also use as a timer if needed.

Evernote for me as well - I use it for a range of functions (research, keeping receipts in, articles I've seen on the web) but for cooking it works in the following ways:

* I see a recipe on the web (say the guardian) - there is an add-on for chrome/firefox that strips away the rest of the page and then copies the text to evernote

* I see a recipe in a magazine/book - I take a picture of the recipe on my phone and it's saved to evernote - because it does optical character recognition, the picture is searchable

* Shopping - all my recipes are accessible on phone, so if I fancy doing one, I just bring it up on my phone and get the ingredients

* Sharing - If I'm talking to someone and they like the sound of a receipt, a couple of clicks and I've emailed it to them

* Cooking - I have the receipt up on my phone/laptop as needed.

I have a Cath Kidston recipe folder. I hand-write them all, and have recently realised that pencil is better than pen for this as it means I can edit them, and there's less danger when I spill food all over them. The folder is not as pretty as it was when I first got it, I managed to burn the back of it.

Easy, I just look for the crinkled and dog-eared pages of books and magazines on the kitchen shelf that are covered in stains and food residue. This is optically easy and a perfect indicator for the quality of the recipe.

The proof of the pudding, as we all know ...

Photos and videos sit happily alongside weblinks and text files. It syncs between my phone and laptop, and it's free.

It is but if you want to use it on your phone without a data-connection, you need to pay for it - I do so because it has other useful functions I use for my work/research such as pdf search.

I've been cutting recipes out of the Guardian weekend for years, well, decades actually. Have them in an ENORMOUS unsorted pile which I never look at - it's much much quicker to look them up in your recipe database or google them. Still can't quite bring myself to throw them out though... yet...

If I cook something a like it I type the recipe into a Word doc and save it in my Dropbox. Then I can look at it on my phone when I'm in the kitchen (or at friends' houses) and share them all really easily via Twitter or email. I can even 'star' the ones I use the most so they are available for offline viewing.

I use a combination of all of the above - cookbooks, handwritten recipes in binders or on cards, things I cut out from mags and newspapers, and my favorite food blogs.

I try to keep some sort of order, e.g. baking, dessert, sauces - and I usually succeed in finding old favorites again when I need them.

As I sometimes need to access recipes when I'm away somewhere, I keep the ones that really important to me in a storage space provided by my mail service.

Badly!

I have a load of cookery books with bits of paper and old Tesco receipts acting as book marks. I then have bundles of recipes ripped from magazines - all in random order. Finally, there are all those recipes that are in racks by the supermarket entrance - also all in random order. I often find it easier to google the main ingredients with the word recipe, select a likely candidate and print it off. After use it gets added to the pile. What I need is a rainy day, a log fire and a bottle of wine to get it all sorted out.

I use pinterest for storing my online recipes

Mostly in my head, with the odd reference to a book or online reference on the odd occasions where precision is required.

Even though I love cookbooks and have plenty of them, I find the Recipics app for Iphone/Android absolutely fantastic. You can store recipe cards (My mum keeps all her recipes on cards so this is very useful for me), newspaper clippings, or if you're somewhere and you see a recipe you like in some else's kitchen/book, you snap a pic and add some details and presto! it's a truley fantastic thing and i've been using it for a while.

Might be a bit annoying search wise, but incredibly useful and very easy to back up. You can also type in recipes or copy/pase text from the web.

One too may many odds!

Mine are all copied and pasted into a Word doc, plus some typed in from friends and family. Then I just do ctrl+f when I'm thinking of what to do with a particular ingredient or looking for a particular recipe. I do keep thinking there's probably a better way of organising this, but it works at the moment, so have never got round to it.

I just use the serving suggestions on tins and packets. Makes it so much easier.

Envelope

You may like to try Gourmet Recipe Manager: http://grecipe-manager.sourceforge.net/

Gourmet Recipe Manager is a recipe-organizer available for Linux and Windows that allows you to collect, search, organize, and browse your recipes. Gourmet can also generate shopping lists and calculate nutritional information. It imports Mealmaster, MasterCook and KRecipe files and exports PDFs, webpages and other formats. Gourmet is free software and uses Python, GTK+ and SQLAlchemy.

Our recipes are organised sort of chronologically. We have exercise books of pasted in newspaper and magazine clippings from 25 years ago up to 10ish years ago then we moved to plastic sleeves in ring binders. We have a huge lever arch file full to bursting now. We have some recipes on the computer but they tend to be printed out and put in the ring binders as the computer is not in the kitchen and we don't have an iPad ;-)

The chronological system works for us because my mind works that way. For eg the eldest rang last week seeking a lamb tagine recipe. I said ring me back in 15min. 5 minutes later I had it after thinking about where and when we were when we first tried it which lead me straight to the large spiral bound scrapbook where I found it.

Categorising things is minefield. My wife rang me from work last week asking for a recipe to give someone that was in the exercise books which have been indexed. Consulting the indices was a mistake though as it was indexed in a very strange, to my mind, place. I found it eventually by browsing. That is the problem with all filing and indexing system. What about an entree dish you always super size into a main? Where does a salad stop and morph into a warm stew with vegetables? Should fish with pancetta be under seafood or 'bacon' or Italian or pork?

Since a lot of our recipes are also in books (much bookmarked and annotated) trying to organise them all is a mug's game. Besides there is serendipity, finding something much better than the dish you were looking for, if you are too organised you rule that out.

I use Evernote, which is great for clipping recipes from websites. The nice thing about that is that I can access it on my phone, so if I'm shopping and see a particular ingredient on offer, I can search for a recipe that works with it. Oh, and I also use a ring binder full of photocopies of friends recipes and other random bits of paper.

I’ll have to try Evernote, I’ve heard of it but never used it. Without being arrogant I don’t use many recipes as such, I know them off heart so don’t need a reference. For those recipes that are cooked irregularly or really do demand exact measures then I record them in those ‘cookery books’ that you can buy from discount book stores.

I’m dyslexic but somewhat counter intuitively I find the act of writing the recipe down helps it lock into my head, but this could be achieved using IT solutions. The IT route might be better as I still have to type it in and my dyslexia software will do lots of clever things like produce preparation plans and read the recipe back to me.

I dumped a lot books a few years ago (by books I mean published books) as I had hundreds and I was never going to cook from a lot of them, I still have some books from over 30 years ago though. I’m planning another clear-out soon, much like clothes I think if you haven’t cooked from a book for a couple of years then you probably don’t need it.

I have a workbook for new recipes which, if successful, are transferred, in Word, to my PC (and backed up to an external HDD), which are printed if needed (electronics like tablets and mobes have no place in a kitchen).

Recipes which I've been cooking for much of my life live in my head, except for those which found their way into a notebook in the 80s, during a vain attempt to teach - at her request - my then wife to cook, something for which some people just have no aptitude.

Little gets written down in detail, except for those I publish on my blog - mostly it's just a basic aide memoire for ingredients and quantities. Most techniques are pretty much hardwired by now, though new ones will sometimes be recorded.

I'm enjoying building a pinterest board at the moment, quite like being able to scan them visually.

I’m dyslexic but somewhat counter intuitively I find the act of writing the recipe down helps it lock into my head,

This is actually a very good technique for anyone whose memory, for whatever reason, is poor (and was pounded into me in my teens as an office boy). I find typing equally effective.

This is especially valuable to me as, thanks to the vagaries of severe ME, my memory is appalling (much of my memory from January last year back to the mid 80s is just gone, except for a few high-lights and some not so high, though before the mid 80s it's fine).

A recipe is not a proper recipe unless it's on paper and has stains on it from what you are cooking.

I use listography.com

Evernote is made for stuff like this.

Very flexible, endlessly useful and great for syncing across multiple devices.

Good for you clearing out unused books. I have hundreds of recipe books and need to do it, but I can't bring myself to do it. Some are still in boxes, stashed in the barn when I moved to France 10 years ago. I could probably dump those without even opening the boxes. I swear I won't buy any more, but I must be an addict, I can't resist them. I also have boxes of magazine and yellowed newspaper cut outs or illicit torn outs from the dentist or doctor's waiting rooms, not to mention hundreds more in Word and now in Dropbox so I can use my cling film covered iPad when cooking from them - anything to avoid using printer ink. I have Evernote, but haven't worked out how to use it yet.

I find http://www.pepperplate.com/ useful and have just downloaded Evernote to try, thank you.

Pepperplate is good for using on the PC as you can install a bookmark widget so that you can copy and paste recipes from various sites into Pepperplate where it displays them all neatly.

Like Forkchop it also automatically saves recipes from a set number of linked websites, but adding your own via the widget is pretty simple too.

Bottle of Chivas Regal, quart of chicken blood and the odd incantation... summon up the spirit of Fanny Cradock, sorted.

Failing that, whatever scraps of paper lying around and prit-stick seems to work.

My cook books now fall open at my most-used recipes, makes it easy to find them when I want to look one up - partly because of frequent use & partly because I have a terrible habit of turning down the pages of books. The books tend to disintegrate after a bit, so I keep at least one pristine, reading copy of all my favourites, and cook out of the stained, torn, held-together-with-sellotape copies.

I have a small file for the occasional magazine/newspaper recipe. If I see one I like online, I tend to print it and put it in the file. If I'm writing/adjusting my own, I'll put it on a record card & tuck it into the file, or upload it onto a Wordpress blog.

Organise?

Organise recipes?

You people really aren't familiar with Spanish cooking norms, are you?

I read cookbooks for overall inspiration but don't often follow a recipe, except for cakes. I have an old card index box where recipes (almost all written down and never made!) are handwritten on cards and couple of A5 ring binders with handwritten sheets and see through plastic envelopes for cuttings. I also scribble recipes onto empty pages in cookbooks and annotate printed recipes with variations. If I copy a recipe onlne I print it out as my kitchen is far too small to have a laptop in use when I'm cooking.

I’ll have to try Evernote, I’ve heard of it but never used it

If you are using firefox or chrome as a broswer, you want the 'clearly' add-on to make clipping receipes from the web nice and easy.

Evernote is by far the best I've found.
- cross platform apps. on Mac, IOs, Windows and Android
- robust synching
- easy to upload pictures e.g. photos or scans of recipes
- full text search of notes and of text in images (v good at finding it)
- awesome web clipping service. Keep an actual article in your library. Works well with the Guardian recipes for example :-)
- free for most. Pro service if you need to upload lots per month.
- now has a meal specific app to record details of a meal.

www.evernote.com

Thanks for that.
I'm missing the Clipping service on here, which i loved. Your recommendation is well timed.

I use a combination of methods. Ages ago I bought a blank recipe book which also has plastic wallets at the back of every section. If I have tried a recipe and liked it, then it is transferred to the book. Recipes torn from magazines or given to me by others are stores in the plastic wallets until they're tested and recipes found online go to pinterest at the moment. Not completely ideal but it mostly works.

Surely half the joy is to not be able to find recipes and take the excuse to spend an hour every now and then flicking through your archive (whatever format that may take) to find inspiration? All the best recipes I have are now 3D thanks to the raisins and tomato puree that have affixed themselves to my pages. This makes them easy to find.
I find the only recipes I ever need to refer to are cake recipes, which require a modicum of measuring, most of the rest are in my head, and they turn out differently every time because I have a poor memory.
I also use Google to find most recipes...and BBC food, which is excellent.

I keep mine - at least the ones I tear out from magazines - in plastic wallets in hard 2-ring binders. I have 2 binders full of the ones I'd like to try, and a much thinner one containing the ones I've tried and want to keep!

Every so often I go through the "To try" files and get rid of the fantasy recipes I'll never get round to making, but there are a few that have been in there a very long time... It works for me though, because the recipes are easy to organise, individual recipes can be taken out when I'm using them, and the plastic keeps them relatively free of raisins and tomato puree.

That said, I still end up googling for half my recipes and cooking from my iphone. Evernote's great but I think I'd need an ipad to use it for cooking.

iPad mounted under wall cupboard

I use BigOven.com. You can type in your own recipes, cut n paste from the Internet, create a shopping list and much more. The user inter face could be better, but it has really helped me be more organized with my recipes. You can categorize in multiple categories and adjust serving sizes too.

If you have a lot of cookbooks, checkout http://www.eatyourbooks.com

It indexes a lot of cookbooks and many popular blogs. You can search it using ingredients, or any keywords you fancy. You can make bookmarks to 'post it' recipes you want to try. You can write both private and public notes. You have to pay for a subscription, but with it, I have managed to discover so many hidden gems in my collection. For example, I was looking for a salsa to go with a bbq a couple of weeks ago. A quick search for 'salsa' finds me a toasted sweetcorn salsa in Delia's summer collection. I'd never thought to look into Delia for a salsa recipe. And it's lovely, just like what you'd expect from Delia.

My bread recipe is on a post-it on a cupboard door. A small post-it.
My daughter prints off recipes and sticks them to doors as well - it they are any good they stay.

There is also a collection of stained and dog-eared bits of paper and print outs and books.

For recipes that you'd traditionally store on recipe cards, I have mediawiki hosted on a server under my own domain. (That's the engine that runs wikipedia). I can view it on any computer or mobile device. I know that aren't a solution to people who aren't comfortable at running websites.

cookies, chocolate chip

- online - iGoogle Bookmarks work best (no need for zillions of usernames&passwords on various cook websites) Also the search associated works v.well
...but I end up with the recipe written on a piece of scrap paper - better than fumbling with keypads in sticky& floury environments

- on the paper - a notebook with pages numbered & a summary list of the recipes on the first 2 pages .
More satisfying would be a spring-binder with an A-Z index - functional & less wasted paper - pop out the recipe to use, tear it down if not used/satisfying or add a new one to the archive..

So, until I can visualize my recipe as a hologram out of my smartphone/ipad / whatev, cloud or not, paper will still be my favorite medium for keeping recipes.