Best way to store a lot of recipes in an RV

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twilightrabbit

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Nov 22, 2017
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My husband and I are downsizing and getting ready to put our home up for sale in March in anticipation of full-time rv'ing.  I have a LOT of recipes I'd like to take in our fifth wheel with us.  I've thought of digitalizing them but I really like having a paper recipe in front of me.  Any suggestions for good ways to store them in an organized fashion other than a recipe box (It'd take quite a few).  I MAY have to bite the bullet and take pictures of them all.  Then how would I store them, in WORD?  I'm 67 and not great at tech things.  I appreciate any and all help you can give me.  Thanking you in advance.  Ellen
 
Great Horned Owl said:
Digitize, and print a copy when needed. Throw it away when you finish it.
Joel
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Most of the recipies I have are already Digital when I get 'em. but even when it is from a cookbook (And I have a few) If it is one I want to make over again I will type it in myself or scan it, depending, and store it. print and toss as GHO does.

Also when I do a Pot Luck I will often print multiple copies and one extra just of the ingredents

The Ingreadents gets taped to the dish so people with allergies know what is in it.
 
With my grandmothers recipe box I either took a picture, or if it was really used (hard to read) I deciphered it and typed it out.

I use my Nook to store and display them. It is large enough to read the print easily, but still small enough that it doesn't take up a lot of counter space.

I also have a lot of recipes I have cut and pasted into text documents. Mostly dutch oven stuff from websites. Those come up nice and legible on the Nook.

I can cut and paste ingredients to a document, sort them out, and send shopping lists to my phone.
 
Gator, I've seen the food you and your wife serve, ya'll certainly don't follow a recipe off of a can. :))
 
kdbgoat said:
Gator, I've seen the food you and your wife serve, ya'll certainly don't follow a recipe off of a can. :))
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You're right. My wife can usually cook something for the first time and then she remembers it from then on. Me, I never make things the same way twice.
 
Great Horned Owl said:
Digitize, and print a copy when needed. Throw it away when you finish it.

Joel
Click to expand...

That's exactly what I do.  I must be a messy cook because usually the printed recipe has a few spots or splatters on it when I'm through and is easy to throw away.
 
How many recipes do you have that you need to bring with you that this even becomes an issue? Recipes don't take up a lot of room and how many complex recipes are you going to want to cook in an RV?
 
I have been collecting recipes for years.  I use a computer program called Accuchef.  It is shareware and costs about $20.00 with free lifetime upgrades.  I have in excess of 100,000 on the data base.  Obviously I have not cooked all of them.  :-*  The program will import a document you can copy.  Because it is shareware it is free to try.  You may want to give it a try. 
 
Recipes don't take up a lot of room
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Tom, DW has several good sized books containing recipes, in addition to loose leaf stuff and cutouts from boxes, etc., so they can take a lot of space (most of a bookshelf). For trips of a few weeks, that's not a big deal, but the OP said they're going into a 5th wheel (fulltiming, I expect), so the heft could be considerable if she wants to keep it all.

Otherwise, it's digitize in some form (time consuming), not QUITE impossible, but...
 
Put recipes on a thumb drive, put the collection in safe keeping with the other things you could not part with or take with?

Or probably more logical, take one good cook book, and some favorite recipes on drive.
 
SeilerBird said:
How many recipes do you have that you need to bring with you that this even becomes an issue? Recipes don't take up a lot of room and how many complex recipes are you going to want to cook in an RV?
Click to expand...

Spoken like a true bachelor!  ;D  So many recipes have such poignant memories attached to them.  (Like my grandmother's Thanksgiving yeast rolls -- oh, the aroma that filled the house!).  To digitize that recipe written in her handwriting meant the world to me.  It's like your instruments or your favorite music arrangements, or your digitized versions of your favorite performances by an artist.  It's a hobby. 

Even recipes found on the web say to me "Gee, that sounds good.  We should try that!".  It's good to build a database. That said, I do retrieve from the database, print, then toss the printed copy after I make it.  Print it out the next time I cook or bake it and toss the printed copy again.
 
When the DW, Diane finds recipes she likes, she transfers them to a 3X5 card and later laminates them. She has separate boxes for cards, like chicken, pork, fish ect. It seems like a lot of effort, but it really helps on the road. She will pull out 4 or 5 cards a week and do the shopping for what the recipe requires.

Then she give me the cards to pick one for dinner. The ingredients are already in the cupboard so dinner is usually ready in 45 minutes or so. It's not a system for everyone, but it works great for her.
 
twilightrabbit said:
....  I MAY have to bite the bullet and take pictures of them all.  Then how would I store them, in WORD? ...
Click to expand...
I had a similar problem.  I would often take a picture of a recipe and paste it in a Word document, then save it to my recipes folder.  But sometimes the picture would disappear.  I think Word may store only a link to the original picture. I solved this by exporting each document to .pdf.  As an alternative, you could just save the pictures in a particular folder.  But the .pdf approach lets you add text in Word before exporting it.  I save each one with a name that starts with the main ingredient so I can easily find them.  If I want a chicken dish, for instance, they are all together. 

Also, I made a document that has the recipes I most often use, and put a shortcut to it on my computer desktop. 

If you like to cook from a printed sheet, you can get a printer - but it will probably take up more space than a recipe box would, and it?s one more piece of tech to wrestle with.  I like printed copies to cook from too, but found it wasn?t hard to adjust to using my computer?s screen. And wiping it off afterwards.  ::)
 
Get a tablet like an iPad or Fire. and take the pictures of your recipes with it and store them there.
I just got my wife a Fire for Christmas and am hoping she will store all her printed out recipes on there.
You can also use the tablet to search for new recipes when you have wifi.
 
My wife has a neat system for recipes.  She stores them in the freezer. They have names like Stouffers, Marie Callender, Michaelangelo, Frescheta, etc.
 
Scan them, save as pdf, make a new gmail account and save them to the 15g google drive space you have for free.
 
Always the last thing a woman has time for in her life, honestly. We have so many associations with recipes: these when we were poor, those from when the kids were little, those from past generations, these to try...

Whatever you do, save them to the cloud. A zip drive can drop in a toilet, a recipe box is awesome but, again, anything can happen.

I'm a fan of both formats: paper and cloud. In the cloud you don't have to worry about your computer breaking, either. They are always available.

I wouldn't try to copy and paste into a document. However, if you choose to do that, try to find a template that mimics recipe cards so that, if you print a page, you have more than one recipe on it, you can cut it down, and then rotate the cards in the box in the rig. For example, you can find picture shields and place the cards in them for safekeeping, and keep the book in the basement of your rig. Keep a general recipe box in the kitchen. Then, once a....month, quarter, season, whatever, go through the book and exchange the recipes in the box. You can do this while you are driving down the road, too. Good time killer (if you don't get sea sick while driving).

Those are my thoughts. Good luck!
 
I would encourage you to digitize them.  In fact, SCAN the originals, and then you will still have the original writer's handwriting for posterity.  There are a couple good reasons to do this...saving them into the CLOUD will make sure that no catastrophe will destroy them forever without possibility of retrieval; you can go ahead and GIVE the originals to your daughter as a legacy, thus freeing you from the space/logistical nightmare of storage; and you will have them readily available no matter where you are.

When I closed down three households in order to fulltime, I had to make a LOT of hard decisions about where "heirloom" things landed.  Let kids choose stuff they want; go ahead and give them their legacy items now (assuming they are mature/responsible); and FREE them of the most grueling and sometime unpleasant task there is:  liquidating Grandma's estate.  That may be the greatest gift of all.  That is how I feel now, after dealing with those three households...but everyone is different, and your solutions may be different too...
 
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