Life has been busyish. I'm now teaching an online class, trying to read more, trying to clean more regularly (please don't assure me I don't need to-- I'd gotten into a vacuuming once a month habit and that's terrible for allergies and asthma), trying to bake/cook one new recipe a week, and still wanting to fit some fiction writing in there.


This might not be that long or coherent, but it's mostly because I want to make myself keep blogging, and it's been a while. I enjoy it when I do it-- it's just making myself sit down and do this instead of surfing facebook that can be a little hard.

I know I posted about my pork chop Parmesan success, and I don't want this to turn into an exclusively food blog, but I am really enjoying cooking and baking lately. The current problem I'm tackling is keeping track of all my recipes. The ones in my cabinet are fine-- I have books that I trust the indexes in, and I have an envelope for loose-leaf recipes. I don't mind sorting through those when I need to find something because there really aren't that many there.

The problem is that I look for recipes online, and I use three different machines to do it-- the desktop, my netbook, and my iPod touch. And I bookmark recipes as I find them. Aside from my bookmarks folder getting very cluttered, I keep running into this problem where I'm getting ready to make dinner or bake a dessert, I need my recipe, and I can't remember which device I saved it on. Adam might be on the desktop doing homework, my iPod is playing white noise for the twins (because I do pretty much all my cooking/baking while they sleep), and my netbook is my only other option. I don't really like interrupting Adam when he's working, but I find myself having to, often.

So, today I googled for online recipe organizers and found an Associated Press article about the best five. I liked the look of four of them, so I signed up for the accounts and I'm trying them out. I think the deciding factors will be: ease of uploading/adding recipes, ease of navigation, and simplicity of the site design. I don't my netbook screen to be cluttered with ads and non-relevant pictures and recommendations for other recipes while I'm trying to see how much baking powder I need. I also don't need the site to generate a grocery list for me-- I don't need everything listed in most recipes, and I find it more time-consuming to uncheck/check all the correct items. It's easier to just type my list on my own. So, if one of these recipe organizer sites focuses heavily on grocery list generation, that'll be a con and not a pro.

The websites are:

I have signed up for each already, and each website's sign-up was simple and unintrusive. Kitchen Monki links with Facebook accounts, and I think Say Mmm might, too. I'll let you know what I think of them after I've tried each for a few days-- remind me to post again if I don't let you know!

Update:
I tried adding recipes to each website and have settled, hands down, on One tsp. as my organizer. Say Mmm handled adding recipes okay, but not the best, and it's basically a grocery-list generator. Kitchen Monki and We Gotta Eat were out within minutes-- adding recipes was a multi-page process that required me to enter ingredients individually. That might be okay if I'm typing up recipes from paper, anyway, but definitely didn't work with copy/pasting, which is all I wanted to do for all my bookmarks. I'd still like to hear from anybody who is using any of these and enjoying them!

Have any of you tried any of these? Any thoughts? What do you look for in a recipe organizer? Do binders/index card boxes work for you? What do you do with online recipes? One reason my online recipe use is restricted to a screen is because we don't have a printer. Once I get the recipes organized, though, that's alright-- my netbook works well in the kitchen because of it's small size and light weight. Also, I've copied recipes to my fridge white-board before and just erase them when I'm done.

On another note, the boys are 14 weeks old as of yesterday! They're still growing and getting big and I love, love to hear them laugh. I can't believe how fast time is going! We're trying to make the transition to cloth diapers during the day, so if anybody knows of a good place to get the covers/prefolds for cheap, that advice would be appreciated!

I was going to post a new picture, but my camera batteries just died. And I should stop writing now because Theo is awake and on my lap and wanting some attention.

I'll try to post again soon!