I found a quick, organized and easy solution, and you don’t need a recipe program to do it. I have found it time consuming to save recipes from the Internet into recipe programs because they require you to type in each separate ingredient into the program’s recipe format. This is too time-consuming especially when you’re scanning lots of recipes.

What you need to save recipes my way is a word processing program such as ‘ Wordpad’, ‘Notepad’ or ‘Microsoft Works’. Most new computers come with a word processing program already installed on it, so if you have a fairly new computer, you probably have a word processing program too. I’m using Windows operating system. Here’s a step-by-step process of making your own computer cookbook.

1. The first thing you will want to do is make a new folder somewhere in your computer such as in ‘My Documents’ called ‘Recipes’, or whatever you want to name your cookbook. You can create a new folder by selecting ‘New’ under ‘ File’, then select ‘Folder‘. A new folder will show up and the computer will prompt you to name it.

2. Open a new document in the word processing program.

3. Highlight the recipe you want to save by left clicking your mouse,

holding it down and dragging the cursor over the entire recipe you want to save.

This should show black highlight over white text when you’re finished.

4. Right click any part of the text you highlighted. An options box should pop up and you need to select ‘copy‘ from it. Now you have copied the text onto the clipboard of your computer.

5. Go back to the blank word processing document and right click your mouse in it. From the options box, select ‘paste’. This will paste your recipe into the document.

5. Save your recipe by clicking ‘save’ in the word processing document.

Double click the ‘Recipe’ folder you created in step 1 to go into this folder.

Now you will want to make a new folder for this type of recipe. Click the ‘ New Folder’ icon at the top of the ‘save‘ box. The new folder will pop up in the save box where you can give it a name. If your recipe is a spaghetti recipe for example, you can make the new folder a ‘ground beef’, ’Italian’ or ‘ main dish’ folder. After you have named the new folder, double click it so you will be saving the new recipe inside of it. Now name the recipe accordingly and click ‘save‘.

Follow this simple procedure for all your Internet recipes and soon you will have your very own organized computer cookbook. You can take this a step further and type in your recipes to try or favorite recipes from cookbooks or magazines; this will save space and money by eliminating the need for cookbooks or recipe storage systems.

I find it very handy and I can find recipes easily. When I want to try one, I print it out. Since it is in a word processing program, you can change the font or the colors to jazz it up.