Recipe App / Digital Cookbook

The problem with using desktop applications for databases of information that you need to persist for long periods of time, is that you will eventually screw up and lose it all (or the program is no longer supported, so no way to run it on Windows 12.4). A cloud-based system avoids that problem:

1) Evernote (free or paid). No filing or organizing, just dump recipes in there and search for whatever you need. Even does OCR (optical character recognition), so you can just take a picture of a recipe with your smartphone, and upload it. It will be OCR'ed and the text will become searchable. If for some reason you want the stuff available offline, just install the (free) Evernote desktop client, select all notes and choose "Export..." from the File menu.

2) Gmail. Email the recipe to yourself. Use the "Filters" function to automatically mark these emails as read, and to automatically label them as "Recipes" (use the "Labels" function to make a "Recipes" label, this acts as a kind of virtual filing cabinet). You can then use advanced search functions on that category. Google has a very liberal "data liberation" policy, which means that if you ever want to "divorce Google", it's easy to download all of your data.

3) allrecipes(dot)com Just sign up for a free account, and you're pretty much done. They have gazillions of recipes, and you can upload your own recipes to your personal virtual recipe box. They also have a function that spits out a shopping list for the recipe you're looking at. They also have an app for Android, iPhone/iPad, Windows phone, and Kindle Fire.

If you own a smartphone, iPad, or Android tablet, consider making a stand so it can be used while cooking, instead of printing out a hard copy each time.

Speaking of smartphones and shopping, there are grocery shopping list apps for both iPhone and Android devices that make the process easier and cheaper, by integrating coupons, scanning bar-codes, and storing what is already in your pantry and fridge. A few automatically synchronize shopping lists across multiple devices, so whatever you add to your list is automatically added to to your significant other's phone, as well.

Great advice, Monte. Thanks!