I couldn’t remember if I’d written about recipe-sharing in a gratitude yet… or had just thought about it. A quick search reminded me that words were indeed committed to page in late January, when I mentioned wanting to figure out how to share some of my family favorites with others. No progress there but I don’t think I’m going to have any success with sharing from my Evernote-based recipe book… unless the recipient also has Evernote. Thinking about a means of recipe sharing has made me realize and appreciate how uniquely personal recipe keeping is for those most serious about cooking. This is nothing a software or app is likely to solve for, nor should it try to, imo.
While I love my template-based Evernote recipe library, many of the most prolific home chefs I know have similarly proprietary, oddly personal, and arguably efficient ways of keeping their recipes. For example, at the beginning of the COVID-19 quarantine, I was part of a recipe challenge. Here are how the recipes came to me:
- A link to a blog, which featured a recipe from a cookbook
- An image of a page from a cookbook
- An image of a photocopy of the hand-written recipe of a grandma
- A recipe presumably copy/pasted from somewhere (origin unknown) into an email in paragraph-form. No bullets, no numbers.
There’s a method to all our madness and should embrace/accept one another’s method as a feature, not a bug.