Organizing My Life: Recipe Edition

     Lester and I were talking about our hobbies the other day.  I have come to the conclusion that my new favorite hobby is definitely cooking and baking.  I love trying out new recipes and  making favorites again.  Mostly, I love seeing the enjoyment others (mostly Lester) get from eating a really great dish.  (O.K. I really enjoy eating, too) ;)

     Southern  Living and Taste of Home magazines are two of my favorite recipe sources.  I also love reading food blogs to get inspiration as well.  Every few months I go through my magazines and clip out recipes that I want to try.  The problem is that I then end up with a large pile of recipe clippings with nowhere to put them.

     My sweet mother made a notebook full of my favorite recipes and gave it to me when I got married.  Super awesome gift, huh?  I love it! :)  She even thought ahead and filled it with empty plastic page protectors so that I could eventually add my own recipes.  That worked great, for a while.  The problem with that system was: 1.  I had WAY too many recipes and 2. Most were odd shapes from being cut and torn out of magazines. 

What to do?
     I came to the conclusion that I needed to either write or type all of these recipes out so that they could uniformly be added to my book.  But, then I had an even better idea!  What if I just created folders and kept all my recipes organized on my computer?  The concept of keeping them stored electronically sounded great, but I was daunted by the amount of work I would have to put in to organize my mountain of recipes.

Enter Kitchenmonki. 
     I did some research and found a few free websites to organize recipes.  There were about 5 websites that seemed like they would work well, but Kitchenmonki looked as if it would serve my purposes the best.

Why do I like Kitchenmonki?
1.  It is electronic and free :)
2.  It does most of the organizing work for me.  I can search by ingredient, meal course, cuisine, or even cook time and find just the recipe I am looking for.
3. Using Kitchenmonki, I can search through my personal recipes or 1,000's of other recipes posted by other users.  (When you add a recipe, it asks if you would like to make it private - only you can see it - or public - any Kitchenmonki users can access.  All of my recipes are private so don't try looking for them) ;)
4.  I can easily create meal plans and grocery lists and print them off.  (Which, i think, is way better than writing it all down on a scrap piece of paper and not remembering where you put it.  Not that I would ever do that!) :)  Apparently, there is a way to pull it up on my phone too.  I just haven't figured that part out yet.

     I have only just started using Kitchenmonki, but I don't have anything to complain about yet.  This is just my free little review for anyone who is interested in electronically organizing your recipes.  Now, I must get back to working on that.  The mountain doesn't seem to be getting any smaller yet...