How to store and organize your recipes in Gmail

by Sarah J. Gim, Posted Sep 3rd 2006 @ 7:12PM

gmail Maybe your bookshelves are sagging under the weight of hundreds of cookbooks. Maybe you have file cabinets in your bedroom full of magazine and newspaper clippings, filed away in color-coded file folders with matching color-coded labels. Maybe you have all your recipes laminated, three-hole punched, and neatly inserted into binders. Heck, maybe you've got them all electronically filed away on your computer. Or maybe you're like me and have them pretty much...everywhere, with no method to the madness.

We all have our own way of storing and organizing our recipes, and Parent Hacks has added to the mix with a helpful way to store your recipes in gmail, which is particularly useful if you use the Internet to find most of your recipes. The Parent Hacker says, "I email myself the recipes to my Gmail account and I have a quick easy way to organize them. I apply a 'Recipes' label to them to keep them from cluttering the Inbox and then I can use Google's handy Search Mail feature to find the recipe I need. The sponsored links section has even shown me some other nice sites to find recipes. Sharing recipes has never been easier too!"

Brilliant! And I've thought about it, and came up with more ways to make a gmail recipe storage even better.

For one thing, it might be worthwhile to set up a gmail account specifically for recipes only. Even though gmail allows you organize and search pretty efficiently with labels, keeping your recipes in a whole separate account will keep everything uncluttered. You have enough trouble dealing with spam, right?

epicurious recipe Most online recipes sites like Epicurious and Allrecipes have an option on each recipe to email. But don't worry if you find a recipe on a site that doesn't have that feature. Simply copy the text of the recipe into an email, and email it to yourself from within your own account.

Once you have the recipes in your email inbox, you get to do a little bit of organizing. The Parent Hacker says that he applied a label called "recipes" to each emailed recipe. Since your whole account is recipes, use gmail labels to categorize the recipes, instead. In the left sidebar, there is a place for you to "Edit labels." Simply create labels for all your recipe categories: appetizers, salads, side dishes, main dishes, etc. One thing gmail allows you to do is attach multiple labels to an email. Since that's the case, create labels for specific ingredients, too. Then you can label your Chinese Chicken Salad with "salads" and "chicken." When you feel like eating a salad, look for "salads." If you happen to have leftover chicken, click "chicken" in your list of labels, and everything with chicken will come up.

If you happen to share a recipe with a friend, email the recipe to him or her. When he or she replies back to you with his or her notes and experiences with it, gmail keeps email replies together. Now you have a running commentary on the recipe.

Worried that you're a wee bit of a recipe hound and might have too many recipes? Don't worry. Last I checked, Gmail has 2760.991741 megabytes of storage.

Source

Filed Under: On the Blogs, How To
Tags: baking, cooking, food, food and drink, recipes

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

9-03-2006 @10:16PM Donna said... ++Most online recipes sites like Epicurious and Allrecipes have an option on each recipe to email. ++

My only problem with this (and other sites that have this feature) is that I've made use of it on some sites and then been overwhelmed with spam. Not sure who tattled my email address, but someone did.

If you use Firefox you can use the Send Link feature from the menu bar under File and it uses your email client to send the URL. Makes it less likely your address will be shared with spammers.
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9-03-2006 @11:31PM Sera said... This is BRILLIANT! Thanks so much for sharing this! :D
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9-04-2006 @3:19AM Alex said... I use delicious - you're pretty much forced to tag things when you save them, can do it with a right click (or a button on the tool bar) and you have all the baking recipes in one place!
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9-04-2006 @9:29AM jbd said... I second the del.icio.us tip -- much faster than having to email something to yourself. It's simple to tagged and sort and I can find whatever I want, whenever I want. Very efficient.
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9-04-2006 @2:53PM Robyn said... I've just been bookmarking on Firefox. I have to create my own organization system (and I think I still have not hit on a really good one) but for the amount I have right now, it works.
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9-04-2006 @6:07PM Erin said... del.icio.us is the way to go. E.g.: http://del.icio.us/kirinqueen/recipes, http://del.icio.us/kirinqueen/soup, http://del.icio.us/kirinqueen/slashfood
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9-10-2006 @10:15PM Josh said... I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one that does this! :-)

I don't recommend using del.icio.us for recipes. One of the major advantages of having everything in one place is I can store recipes mailed from friends, word docs, etc. all within the same program, with the same rules and methods of access. And I've made a habit of not only sending links, but also text for certain sites such as nytimes that have article expiration dates.
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