My Sony Reader as a recipe manager: E-book tech isn’t just for books

By Joanna

Ficbot is on a roll—writing about special uses for e-book tech. Earlier this week she told how she was using her Sony Reader in her work as a teacher. Got your own ideas to write about? Email us. – D.R.

How to organize your recipe? Use index cards? A database online?

 Lifehacker drew 193 comments when it asked those questions.  Cooking is more of a passion than ever, given the high cost of eating out.

Eat at home. Save money, save the planet!

But how do you manage all those great recipe finds? Why is this so difficult for many?

Click on the above screenshot for a detailed view showing what I’ve been up to, with the wonderful Calibre program. More on it—and other solutions—will follow after the basics.

Why recipes are hard to manage and organize

Three main reasons:

• The recipe information is not centrally organized in one place. Many of us get new recipes from a mix of books (some of which might belong to the library or to other people), newspapers, magazines, Web sites and friends. It’s not like buying a copy of a novel (it’s all right there, and you read it and you’re done).

• The information is not always in an easy-to-reach place. For example, it might be stored on your computer, or in a bulky book that does not lie flat or is not portable if you wish to cook in someone else’s kitchen. And if you are at the store doing your shopping, are you going to lug The Joy of Cooking with you? Probably not.
• Computer-based solutions often rely on database engines, which can make it time-consuming and difficult to get your recipes inputted. For example, you can’t just type “3 cups tomato juice” in some programs because 3 is an amount, cups is a unit and tomato juice is an ingredient, so these all have to entered into separate fields. And once you do have it in there, you need to have a way to take it with you, which  leaves you with one more thing to organize.

Simple needs, but not simple solutions

My own needs were simple. I wanted to be able to sit down during a break at work, browse my recipes, see what ingredients they needed, and make a shopping list so I could stop on my way home. Then I wanted to go into the kitchen and have something to refer to as I cooked. You wouldn’t think this would be so difficult!

I was a step ahead of the game, too, because I already had most of my frequently used recipes on the computer. I occasionally track my eating for a few days, both as a check-up to make sure that I am not overdoing the calories, and because I have to watch my nutrition a little since some restrictions due to food allergies make iron and calcium an issue. So I gradually built up a little collection in Spark Recipes. This Web site automatically calculates the nutritional information for any recipes you enter, and is linked with Spark People, the website I use when I’m tracking. I can open up a recipe on Spark Recipes, click a button and add it to my log for the day.

Once you have the recipes in there, it’s easy to use, and a helpful tool for those who need to track their eating. But how to take it with me? At work, I have Internet access, so I can prepare my meal plan and shopping list. But once I am in the kitchen, I need a printout. I don’t have a full desk in my current home. What a hassle to drag out the printer from the closet every time I want to make noodle soup! I was resorting to post-it note crib sheets. Surely there was a better way?

The e-book answer

I looked into some iPod Touch apps, but found them lacking. I did not relish the thought of re-typing the recipes into something again when they were already on Spark Recipes. I especially did not relish the thought of doing it on the Touch’s tiny virtual keyboard! And the iPod shuts itself off after a minute or so—-not exactly practical when one is trying to follow a recipe in real-time!

Then I thought of compiling them all into an e-book. But adding any sort of manageable browsing features such as an index or table of contents is time-consuming, and the thought of having to edit and then re-convert the whole thing every time I added a new recipe was a turn-off. If only each recipe could be its OWN book—-wait, why couldn’t it be?

I opened up Spark Recipes, clicked on a recipe, opened up the ‘print’ window and copied everything. Then I pasted it into KompoZer, my Web page program. Bingo! The whole recipe was there, including the nutritional calculation, all in about two clicks. At that point, all I had to do was get the recipe collection onto the Sony in a way that didn’t clutter up the book collection part.

Calibre to the rescue…again

I use Calibre to manage my Sony Reader. It uses tags to allocate items to collections, which are grouped together on the Reader in neat little sub-sets for easy browsing and selecting.

This is an ideal set-up for recipes. I could easily group them into sub-types and use the collections to browse only the desired category. Looking for a dinner recipe, but only a soup? Or, on a summer’s day, anything but a soup? Just set the tags accordingly and browse away. And ‘books’ can be part of more than one collection. I don’t tend to go overboard with the tags (I have only four collections for the recipes) but if you want to be that specific, go nuts. The collections list sorts alphabetically, so they’ll all wind up in the same general area when you’re looking for them.

I saved each recipe as an HTML file, imported them into Calibre, used the built-in converter to make Sony-friendly RTF files, then tagged them into four collections:

• Recipes: Entrees
• Recipes: Other
• Recipes: Snacks
• Recipes: Soups

The alphabetical auto-sort is handy—I don’t need to go hunting all over the reader, and they don’t get in the way of my various fiction collections. And when I want to add a new recipe, I don’t need to worry about editing a massive master file, or adding entries to an index, or filing pieces of paper in some sort of binder or book and remembering to bring it with me when I shop, plan or cook. I just copy the recipe, save it, and throw it into Calibre. Tag it, load it, and off we go.

Easier to cook and shop

It’s so easy to plan meals now. A few times a week, I’ll go out, or I’ll eat something simple and quick that can be made with pantry staples. About twice a week, I’ll cook a ‘proper’ recipe and freeze the leftovers. Now that I have my e-cookbook, all I need to do is decide ‘will I be cooking a soup, or will I be cooking an entree?’ Then I just open up the relevant collection, browse for something interesting, and two button-clicks later, I have the full instructions, with nutrition information and ingredient listings, ready for study.

Too lazy to go even as far as I did? Don’t worry about cookbooks, or magazines or Spark Recipes. Just cut and paste directly from your favorite recipe website. I like Recipe Zaar, but here are some other popular ones:

• All Recipes.
• Epicurious.
• Cooks.com.
• The Food Network.

There are blogs and message boards aplenty. Find something interesting, copy and paste it into a word processor, save it as whatever file type and load it up. Calibre handles HTML files very nicely and can convert them into many file formats, and some readers like the Sony can accept RTF, Word or PDF files without further converting.

This is by far the best recipe solution I’ve ever found. I love having everything right there to browse and use!