Technology Tuesday: Organizing your recipes with Gmail

Week 4 of  Home Storage Solutions 101's 52 week Organized home Challenge is Cookbooks and recipes.  This is a perfect segue into me showing you just how big a geek I am.  

My recipe Gmail hard at work at
dinner last night.  Yeah Kindle Fire!

Have you ever been at the store and come across a super bargain on something and then not be able to remember everything else in the recipe that you were thinking about making with it?  Do you have a smartphone or tablet that can access your email account whileyou're at the grocery store? If so, you are well on your way to chucking all those loose, sauce covered, sticky recipe cards that we all know and love, but can barely read for all the stains.


But, isn't it a ton of work to convert all of my recipes?  Well, yes but your up front work will pay off in the long run.  The time you spend typing them up will save you time rifling through them in the future as well as having to rewrite them the next time you spill something on them.  Also, where do you get your recipes from?  If you, like me, get a lot from your favorite magazines, you either have piles of pages ripped out of magazines or you have to spend time writing them up.  You see where I'm going?  Plus, when is the last time you carried your recipe box with you to the grocery store.  I wasn't kidding about the bargains, but also, if you just see something in teh grocery store that sparks a craving you can just look up the recipe on your phone lickety-split!


To give credit where credit is due, this is not my original idea.  It was born from this article http://lifehacker.com/197975/store-your-recipes-in-gmail but I did make it my own in several ways.

Unlike the article, I don't use my main email, i created a completely separate email account.  I did this for 2 main reasons 1) I was HOPING that some of my friends and family would contribute their favorite recipes to the "book" and then log in to use the account as well so i wouldn't want them nosing around in my regular email.  Props go out to Betsy who may be the only one (B, I had to change the password recently so let me know if you want the new one) and 2) This allowed me to create a ton of different labels without getting them mixed up with my regular email.


Where do you get your recipes from? 

• Friends: Just ask them to email you the recipe either to your main address or directly to your recipe address.  I tend to ahve them send it to my regular email both because they already have that email AND because I like to clean up the email before forwarding onto my recipe email.  Generally I have the recipe title in the subject line, the repeat the recipe title in the main body followed by the ingredients and instructions.  
• Magazines: As much as I love technology, I still love flipping through magazines.  When I come across a recipe in magazine I rip it out and put it in my recipe file to type up later (I used last week's recipe challenge to get caught up on my backlog).  9 times out of ten all I have to do is go to the website of the magazine and search for the recipe and then you can copy and paste the recipe into an email (I usually send the recipes from my main account to HazelsRecipes because I'm usually logged into my main email)
• Parties:  Don't you hate it when you're out at an event and fall in love with a dish and either don't know the person well enough to feel like you can ask them to send you the email.  OR you do know them but know they will never remember to send it to you!  I've found that a great trick is to just ask them what's in it and then come home to a site like  allrecipes or food.com that allow you to do ingredient searches.

Labels

Once you get a few recipes into your new recipe email account, the next step is to label them.  For those of you who don't use Gmail, think of a label as a "folder" or "tag" that helps you organize your emails. In the Lifehacker article, it appears that they are suggesting just one label called "recipes" within your regular email account.  The downside of this is that it would create a single, very long list of emails.  I needed a bit more categorization.  I suggest creating labels that mirror the categories in your recipe box.  You can even create "sublabels" for those recipe categories that you have a lot of and/or want to be able to browse very specific categories.  This way, the next time you need a recipe from a specific category, say a yummy appetizer for a SuperBowl party or a decadent dessert for Valentine's Day, you can just click on the label and browse all your recipes.  


In addition to my main category labels I created a few extras to let folks know which were my favorites.  Again, my original intent was to use this as a shared recipe database and seeing as how there are recipes in there I will probably never get around to making, I thought it a good idea to give some recommendations to folks who logged in.  One of the things that I like about Gmail is that you can put as many labels on an email as you like.  The sky is the limit on how granular you can be in your organization!


Other tips and tricks:
1) Gmail's new inboxes make it easy to manage your tagging.  I don't always go in an label all the recipes right away, so by using the "unread first" you can label all of your unread messages and then "mark them as read" to get them off the top of the list.





2) Want to protect your main email account from spam, but still want to get in on all the neat recipe email lists out there?  (I love newsletters from Taste of Home and SparkPeople!) Use your recipe email to subscribe to these sites!  You can then use Gmail's Priority Inbox (see tip 1) to separate these from your recipes by marking them as not important.
3) When copying a recipe from a website use the "print" function on the page to bring up a "cleaner" version of the recipe before copying.  If you try to copy and paste from the main page you will end up copying a lot of extra ads and other html that will gunk up your email when you paste it.




So what do you think?  Are you ready to take the Gmail recipe plunge?  If you want to peruse my recipes, I'm happy to let you for the low, low price your favorite recipes!  I accept email, Word Docs, text files, Pinterest and Evernote!  If you don't know that the last two are, stay tuned for future editions of Technology Tuesday.