September 21, 2009

One of the things I love about blogging is the community.  We share a common interest, and it seems to me that most bloggers are very supportive of each other and encourage each others' success.  And if you're lucky, at some point you might get to meet your online friends in person.

The other thing I really like is that bloggers know food!  If I see a recipe posted by Anna, Peabody, Grace, Cathy, Susan, Michelle, Susan, Lisa, or  Heather (among many, many other incredible cooks and bakers), I am confident that I can make that recipe and it'll turn out great.  If I have any questions or problems, or successes I want to share, then I know who to go to.  I can't do that with the cookbooks on my shelves.

The only problem with online recipes though is how to organize them.  I used to highlight the recipe and paste it into Microsoft Word, then print it out and save it to my hard drive.  But then I had all of these hard copies to sort and file, and who ever goes back through all of those?  There's too much paper in our lives to deal with already.  And invariably I save a recipe to my laptop at home, and then later need to access the recipe at work so I can pick up the ingredients on my way home.

What if you could save an online cookbook of all your favorite recipes, sorted the way you want it?  Well, you can do just that and it's super duper easy!  Are you using Delicious bookmarks?  If you are, then you can tweak it to organize your online recipes, and if you're not, then think about getting on board!

Delicious is awesome because you just sign up for a free account, and then you use it to bookmark your favorite pages.  It doesn't matter which computer you're on.  Your bookmarks are on Delicious, not on one particular computer.  The other cool thing is that you can choose to share your bookmarks and your personalized cookbook with other people that you specify.

So, let's set up your online cookbook!

• First, access your account at http://delicious.com or set up a new account.

• In the right sidebar, click on Tag Options and choose Manage Tag Bundles.

• A new window opens. Click on Create to make a new tag bundle.

• In #1, enter the Tag Bundle Name, something like “Emma's Cookbook”.  In #2, enter the tags that you want to use to sort your cookbook.  Separate your tags with spaces.  You could use broad categories like appetizers, vegetables, meat, and dessert, or you could use more specific tags like cookies, chocolate, soup, potatoes, quiche, candy, fruit, etc.  You get the idea.  It's totally up to you and how you want to organize your recipes.

• Click on the green Save button, and you're done!  Voila!

Now, when you go back to your Delicious home page, you'll see your tag bundle listed on the right sidebar under Tag Bundles.  To place a recipe into your cookbook, just add your tags to it before you save the bookmark.  Delicious will sort it into your cookbook bundle, and you just have to click on the tags in your cookbook to show all of the recipes with that tag.

If you decide later that you want to add more tags to your cookbook, just choose Tag Options and Manage Tag Bundles again. Then click on Edit next to your Tag Bundle's name.  Add, change or delete your tags as you wish, then Save.

That's it!  You have your own online cookbook, wherever you are!  I hope that you give this a try and enjoy it as much as I do!

~BigSis