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3/29/2010

How To Keep Family Recipes

Have you collected a sizable number of recipes over the years? For example, think of your grandmother's special baked yams. Or, during the holidays, consider the wonderful mint lamb that your mom always cooks. An important part of being a cook is using a recipe. This is primarily why recipes that are valuable to us, are cataloged. These are important things to you, yet, if their ingredients and cooking instructions are not ever written down, they probably would get lost forever.

If you let this happen, you will might miss another important part of being a good cook. You would be not able to pass on these specialties to your future generation or anyone that is close to you. Besides preparing great food, tracking your recipes is a way to preserve tradition.

Here, in the text below, are some tips to get you started.

Put Everything In Writing

Keeping track of how you prepare foods is important and well worth doing. Even though, it may not appear relevant right now, consider what would happen if you suddenly could not remember one final ingredient or the right baking temperature. What if it has been years since you cooked the recipe and you completely forgot it? The chances of this happening to you will be slim, if you keep detailed notes. That way, no matter what you may forget, you will always have your notes as a backup.

As you store recipes for many years, you may also want to add what substitutes can replace an ingredient. For example, if one recipe calls for sweetened evaporated milk, and there is none on the shelf, you might include how you can use a mixture of a tablespoon of sugar or honey as a substitute. Also, if the recipe asked for a particular name of a food manufacturer, a similar food, but with a different manufacturer may be able to be used instead, and can be noted on the recipe.

What Is Your Perfect System

Jotting down notes on an index card and then storing them in a file box is the typical way to keep recipes. In addition to this method or several other storage options. There are a lot decorative kitchen binders that can hold many pages of recipes. Today, you can keep a track of your recipes on a hand held PDA or desktop computer. It all depends on what best suits your style and personality.

Expanding Your Collection

Even if you do not cook that often, as time goes by, you will probably end up gathering many recipes. A good way to manage your collection is to design it in such a way that it can be expanded. That is one of the key points as to why the familiar file box method remains popular. Putting the recipe in the index file is simple. Consider also, that you could do the same thing with a binder or a file on a computer. Any one of these methods will provide you with the ability to grow your collection easily as you store another new recipe.

For more tips and help on how to use recipes to help you become a better cook, visit the Internet where you can purchase an ebook on everything you ever wanted to know about cooking but could never ask.

1 comment:

JCoulston said...

My wife and I will have to start doing this. We usually just remember our recipes but we won't be around forever *sigh* ha. Good Tips

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Justin Coulston
CoulstonCookingConsortium.blogspot.com