Recipes, keep or toss?

I love your idea although I'm afraid I'm not organized/motivated enough to make it happen. Plus my recipe "books" are actually small photo albums, the kinds with a little pocket and then I just stick the cut out recipes in there.

Recipes, for me, are usually either aspirational or inspirational.

Aspirational in that, in another life, one with more time or more money (never have both at the same time, it seems), or more ambition, I'd make some of the harder and more time-consuming stuff. Inspirational in that I'd probably not make a specific item but instead would use their ideas to make something else, e. g. grab a spice mixture and use it elsewhere, that sort of thing.

For my own recipes, I keep them as reminders. Oh yeah, it's a teaspoon not a tablespoon, that sort of thing.

I like not too complicated dishes, which are good and easy to make. I am for vegetables which makes a plate colourful and food should not be too expensive but a pleasure for the eye and mouth.

I see I messed up that original link.
Trying again -
Melissa Clark's take on roasted chestnut, apple, calvados, whipped cream soup

We have an entire bookcase devoted just to cookbooks. I regularly use about 6 of the books. The others I glance through once or twice a year for inspiration and then improvise something of my own.

Mom clips recipes from the newspaper all the time. They're saved in a big pile. I treat them like the other "glance through" books. Look at 'em for inspiration and then search for them on the internet if I find anything interesting.

I also collect recipes online from favorite cooking sites and from you fellow A2K cooks. I have a category in my documents folder just for recipes where I copy and paste recipes and save them with very descriptive titles as to what they are. I just print out a recipe when it is needed and don't have to thumb through books to find what I'm looking for.

In the recipe category, I have some of them sorted further into categories labeled "favorites" and "want to try." I'm starting to collect so many that I'll probably need to sort them further into categories according to main ingredient.

We used to have a lot of mom's recipes in the A2K portal database but all of those disappeared when we switched to the new version of A2K.

hoarding=the acquisition of and failure to discard a large number of recipes that appear to be useless or of limited value.

Easy choice. Scan them into the computer. Spend days organizing files, and years waiting for the hard disk to crash.

I started trashing cut-out recipes about 15 years ago. The internet was there - who needed to save that crap - when there's other crap (not yet saved on the internet) to save.

There is one exception. A small journal that has a few proven recipes as well as words and phrases I'd had to look up. That journal goes back about 30 years. It's about the memories, not the recipes. It'll go in the next few years.

I've cut quite a swath of them so far, but still have some keepers. It's a little like I still like to read a real newspaper, though I rarely ever do now, what with the price of subscriptions.

Now Dys, aren't you glad I saved that spaghetti with anchovies and clams, wine, rosemary, chile pepper recipe?