What are some of your favorite recipes? And, just curious how big is your recipe box? Is it digital or printed?

Our recipe collection is big and scattered all over the place here. Have an old box with really old index cards, written recipes on paper tucked into cookbooks in the dining room, cookbooks in a bedroom and then there's the old standby of our heads. Oh then there's the ones saved on the computer or the certain websites that have good ones I want to try so I have different ones on internet too.

My recipes are just like yours, Amanda. All over the place, old recipe box, stacks of magazine recipes, email recipes, pinterest recipes, and I don't try new ones nearly enough,

I don't either just because of time and I tend to forget by the time grocery day comes around.

I went through all those I had cut out and saved and threw most away. The rest I printed out and put in protective sleeves in a binder. Numbered the sleeve pages, and made a nice, alphabetized table of contents. I put a few pix of things I had made on the cover.

That sounds like a great idea Anna!

Almost all of my recipes are saved in a program called Mastercook. I do have one binder with recipes that I saved over the years before computers, but rarely refer to it. And I also have a bookcase full of cookbooks that I rarely consult, now that it's so much easier to just search the internet for a recipe!

Sandy, I forgot that I also have recipes in Mastercook. I started that years ago, and nothing could go into it until it was tried and rated excellent. I still have it somewhere, but not on this computer. I'll have to retrieve it. It was a handy program and easy to email recipes to people.

Mostly I just cook by the seat of my pants, but I do love raw spinach salad. No amounts on ingredients as I just eyeball it all

raw spinach
sliced raw mushrooms
sliced red onion
sliced hard boiled eggs
cooked and crumbled up bacon
feta cheese
bits and pieces of cashews
throw it all together and enjoy

I do pretty much the same, gingin, and we love it, especially in summer! The heat makes me crave simple to fix, lighter fare.

I have cook books from both of my grand mothers, my mother and some I have collected my self over the years. Most I have collected are for wild game since I hunt and fish. I also have a bunch I have made into my own cook book collection of stuff I got off the internet, scanned from magazines and newspapers, lot of those are diabetic recipes since I am type two.

One of my favorites but most people read it and go yuk with out trying.

Grilled Coyote with a glaze
Slow cook the animal meat over a grill, marinate with your favorite meat marinate, roll in cabbage leaves when done, and serve with steamed white rice.

Or instead of a marinate use a glaze.
in a separate pan you melt butter.
Add the honey. From my bees!
Mix the honey in well as it begins to bubble. You want to keep the heat low so the honey doesn’t over caramelize and burn.
Then add the whiskey.
Then the orange juice.
Then the cayenne.
Let it bubble as you whisk until it is thick and a nice deep orange. Brush half of the glaze onto the coyote back straps until it is nice and blanketed in orange goo. Allow to heat a bit then turn and use remainder.

Al

Welcome Al, that coyote recipe is interesting, sort of. Most people say YUK because they have canines as pets, but in other countries people eat what is available. I myself am not going to eat any bugs, not even if they are covered in chocolate!, but I will eat eel and soft shelled crabs. To each their own.
Do you trap/shoot the coyote yourself? Do you have to soak it to remove some of the gaminess?

I nabbed this 1930's Tigerwood card filing box on Ebay for next to nothing about 10 yrs ago one Christmas night. It wasn't very pretty and some of the hardware inside was missing. I refinished it and mounted it it under my cabinet where my recipe cards have always been stored. In it are hand written cards from my grandmother, mother, family, and friends. Recipe cards have gone to the wayside. But my adult daughters love looking through them! I couldn't bear to give away my cookbooks. I used a Seal-A-Meal to help preserve them in a box in the garage.

Cheryl, what a great Ebay find that card file was! I still have a very old -- I think I bought it in the early 1970s -- metal recipe card box with some very well-used hand-written recipes in it... just for nostalgia, I guess, because I've also entered all of them in Mastercook and really use that almost exclusively now. I printed out all of my "favorite" recipes and put them in plastic sheet protectors in a notebook, so they are a whole lot more legible than my hand-written (and food spattered) ones ever were! Easy to print another one off if someone asks for a recipe, too. I can't seem to even consider getting rid of my cookbooks, either

I still have most of my old cookbooks. I know I can find any recipe on the internet, but I do love my cookbooks. I wonder how long it will be before the kids say 'what is a cookbook?'

Food splatters on the 3 x 5 cards give it character. I have the regularly used cards sleeved in plastic made for the cards' size. On the really well-used card (listed under "Frequently Used") the plastic covers have been melted on to them from being placed under hot-from-the-oven trays, etc. They make me laugh when I see them. My own handwriting has changed through the years. I still recognize my grandma's handwriting and my aunties. My cards are no where near perfect. Some recipes have not even been tried. But I know the cards have been well-loved and placed in the box with the best intentions.

My cards are the same, Rosie, and I love having my Italian grandma's hand written recipes. I will pass them on to my girls. Right now I don't think they'd appreciate them, but I'm hoping age will make changes.

I have the same sort of jumble of cookbooks, newspaper and magazine cuttings, recipes from friends, printouts from internet recipes. What I have started doing is scanning them and saving them in my Dropbox file on my computer. Now if I want a particular recipe, I drag my iPad into the kitchen and look it up from my Dropbox files. One of my very favorite recipes is one I snipped out of the Food Section of the L.A. Times nearly 50 years ago!

I also have a lot of old recipes cut from the Times around that time. They had some wonderful recipes!

Indeed, they did! Another of my favorites (and it's one my husband loves) came from the same place and around the same time. The original recipe was kind of a pain to make. It involves taking round steak and beating it thin with a mallet (you end up wearing little splatters of meat and flour), then rolling pieces up with a slice of pickle and a sausage link, fastening with toothpicks (I hate anything that involves toothpicks), and a whole bunch of other fussing. I turned it into a casserole. It's a slightly odd combination of ingredients, but boy is it yummy! Here's the recipe, if anyone's interested:

KOSHER PIGS IN A BLANKET (Heh, NOT the original recipe name)

1/4 cup flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
2 lb round steak, 1/2 inch thick
2 tbsp minced parsley
1 large dill pickle
6 pork sausage links
3 tbsp shortening
1 med onion, chopped
1/3 cup water
1/2 cup tomato juice
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

Combine flour, salt and pepper. Pound seasoned flour into meat until steak is about 1/4 inch thick. Cut into six pieces about 3 1/2 by 5 inches each. Sprinkle with parsley. Cut pickle into six strips. Place a strip of pickle and a sausage link on each piece of meat. Roll and fasten with wooden picks. Brown meat rolls in shortening. * Pour off fat. Add onion and water to meat, cover tightly and simmer 1 hour. Mix tomato juice and Worcestershire sauce. Add to meat, cover and simmer 30 minutes longer. Remove picks and place rolls on a warm platter. Thicken cooking liquid with flour, if desired. Makes 6 servings.

*Alternative cooking method:

Remove rolls from pan and place in glass baking dish just large enough to hold rolls easily. Pour off excess fat from browning pan. Add onions and water to pan; heat and stir just long enough to loosen browned bits from pan. Pour over rolls in baking dish and cover snugly with aluminum foil . Bake at 350 for 1 hour. Mix tomato juice and Worcestershire sauce. Add to baking dish and re-cover with foil. Continue baking 30 minutes longer. Remove picks from rolls, remove rolls from dish and keep warm. Optional: Pour cooking liquid from dish into glass measuring cup; allow to stand long enough for excess fat to rise to surface and skim off fat. Thicken remaining liquid to desired consistency with flour or constarch.

For casserole version:

Mix cubes of beef, sausage, pickles and onion in the following ratio:

2 parts diced sausage (i.e. 10 oz) - (I cut sausage links into 4 pieces)
4 parts cubed beef (i.e. 20 oz)
1 part diced pickle (i.e. 2 med to large or 5 to 6 oz),
onion to taste (at least half as much as pickle)

Sprinkle with salt, pepper and parsley. Add water and proceed as in alternative cooking method.