How to organize your recipes

01One place, not five

Most recipe collections aren't useless because they're messy, but because they're scattered: some in a notebook, some in the phone's gallery, the rest in saved links. The first and most important step is to have one single place where every recipe goes - even if at first you only write down its name and ingredients.

02A few good categories

Six to eight categories are plenty: soups, mains, pasta, salads, sides, bakes, breakfasts. If a recipe fits in two - say, a pasta bake is both a main and pasta - put it in both; categories are there to narrow things down quickly, not to find the one right drawer.

Too many, too narrow categories (“chicken pasta for weeknights”) only make searching harder.

03A consistent format

Every recipe is easiest to use in the same structure:

• Ingredients with the amount first: “750 g minced pork”, “1 tbsp salt”.
• Steps numbered, one action per step.
• Write out vague amounts too: “black pepper to taste”.

That way you see where you are at a glance while cooking - and if you paste the list into the mabor app in one go, it sets the amounts apart by itself.

04Split it into parts

Many dishes are really two or three parts made separately: meatballs and tomato sauce, dough and filling, sponge and cream. Written as one long list, it's hard to follow which ingredient belongs to which part while cooking. Write them down as separate parts, each with its own ingredients and steps.

05A photo and a note

A photo of the finished dish says more than any description, and you recognize it in the list at once. In the note, write what you want to know next time: where the recipe is from, what you'd do differently, who loved it. If the recipe comes from a handwritten card or an old notebook page, you can photograph that too and keep it with the note, so the original isn't lost either.

06Where to start

Don't try to copy the whole notebook in one weekend. Start with the five recipes you cook most often, and add the rest the next time you make them. In a few weeks, your cookbook comes together by itself.