Expanding your repertoire of recipes can be a lot of fun but it can be challenging. Keeping a big collection of recipes handy means that you get a greater variety of meals at dinner time and you can make groceries last longer by knowing how to make the most of very little. Collecting them can be hard simply because you never know where to start. Here are five tips for finding and printing recipes online so that you can keep making that binder thicker and thicker.
1. Search Based On Favorite Ingredients
Love roasted red peppers? Pan fried chicken? Teriyaki sauce? Whatever it is you like the most, try looking up some hot recipes that utilize it. This way you’ll know that you always have something in the book that you like. There’s not much point in collecting recipes that you know you won’t like, so stick to items that you enjoy or have been meaning to try.
2. Refine As You Go
Keep a pen in your recipe binder so that you can go over each recipe as you cook and change it up as you go. There’s not a lot of fun to be had in simply sticking exactly to the recipe. Over time you may find that you prefer chicken stock in a dish over water or ground oatmeal over flour. Keep changing the recipes and let them develop naturally into your own ideas. Once they’re perfected, you can type up your own version to print out.
3. Copy And Paste To A Word Editing Program
Don’t print right from websites when you find a good recipe, copy and paste it to word to make sure you’re not wasting ink printing a bunch of ads and pictures and so on. There’s no point in printing the whole website out, you only need the text.
4. Try Variations On A Favorite Dish
You never know if the stuffed tomatoes you’ve been making for years have only been the tip of the iceberg. Check out all sorts of variations on favorite dishes. If you love gumbo, look for special variations like crayfish gumbo as well as side dishes like black beans and rice. If you have a meal you love, chances are there are thousands of variations on it.
5. Keep Exploring
The most important thing is to stay curious and stay inventive about the foods you prepare for dinner each night. There’s no point in sticking to the same five or six dishes every single night. Always keep trying new dishes. Even as you develop a short list of signatures, you can keep swapping them in and out with new meals and see what you enjoy. When something is really good, you can put it on the short list, and when it’s not so hot, you can crumple it up and toss it. Over time you’ll have a refined list of favorites with a longer list of dishes you’re still working on, so you’ll always have something to pull out and prepare for dinner, even if you think you’ve tried it all. The great thing about the internet is that it really does provide you with an endless list of recipes you can try. There’s no way you can get through every cooking website that the internet has in one day, one year or even one decade. As long as you keep exploring, you’ll keep finding new and amazing dishes to add to your repertoire. Eventually you may wind up with only a dozen or so out of every hundred that you decide to keep, but finding that dozen recipes you love is half the fun. James has mostly been involved with blogging, writing and reviewing things like printer ink, but has since moved on to products like Konica 1690MF toner.
