For the most part, I embrace technology. I use my iPod daily, am happily bound to my cell phone and spend between 10 and 12 hours a day pecking away at a computer keyboard. There are, however, a couple of places in my life where I haven't been able to surrender to the siren song of digitization. I still use a paper calender, as I like the ability to physically touch a representation of my days and scribble things in with pen and pencil.

I also keep all my recipes on paper. While I have cooked from my computer occasionally, waking up the screen with a dough-y finger to check quantities, I far prefer to hand write my recipes. Part of this attachment to paper comes from the fact that I don't have to worry if a bit of butter leaps out of the mixing bowl and the other part is due to the fact that I love cooking from the recipe cards that my grandmother and aunts originated. I think about my own future descendents and think that they'll also prefer to have a tangible representation of my time in the kitchen.

However, all that said, the sheer volume of recipes I've amassed over the years is beginning to make storage an issue and I've begun to play with the idea of recipe storage software as a way to finally get rid of the bursting file box in our second bedroom. Lucky for me, a new program (sadly for you PC users out there, it's for Macs only) has just recently hit the market that is sort of like iTunes for recipes, making the switch feel intuitive and inevitable. Called SousChef, it allows you to sort and search by name, ingredient and category. You can rate recipes and star your favorite. It makes it easy to scale batches up or down and offers an import feature so that you can pull recipes found on the internet straight into your database. All for $30. I am sorely tempted.

[via The Unofficial Apple Weblog]