Organize Your Recipe Collection For Free

Collecting recipes from all over the world wide web can be fun and very rewarding in terms of the food you eat. It can also be a nightmare to organize. It doesn't have to be. A little work early on will pay rich rewards as your recipe collection grows.

There's no need to buy expensive software, everything you need is on your computer right now. There's no need to print anything out, either, even though most good cooking websites provide you with that facility. You just need to follow the easy, step by step, instructions below.

I'm going to assume that you are a Windows user and that you have Internet Explorer as your web browser (the software that lets you access the internet). If you have a different system don't worry, the only real difference is likely to be that your 'Favorites' file is called 'bookmarks'. I'm also going to assume that you know next to nothing about using that file. You may find it easier to print these instructions out.

Here's what you need to do:

1.Open your browser by double clicking on the 'e' shaped icon on your desktop (the area of screen you see when nothing else is happening).

2.In the top gray bar you will see the following: File Edit View Favorites Tools Help. Click on Favorites.

3.In the menu that appears click on Organize Favorites and in the little box that pops up you will see four buttons on the left. Click on Create Folder.

4.In the little window on the right you will see a new folder appear with the words 'New Folder' highlighted in blue. Without doing anything else, type the word Recipes and hit the 'enter' key. That's step one completed.

5.Now click on Create Folder again and name this folder Chicken. You now have two new folders, one below the other, but we want the Chicken folder inside the Recipes folder and that's easy to do.

6.Highlight the Chicken folder by clicking on it once. Click on the button marked Move to Folder.

7.In the window that appears scroll down to the Recipes folder, click on it once and then click 'OK'. As you return to the original window you will see that the Chicken folder has disappeared.

8.Click on the Recipes folder and you will see it reappear, but this time it's inside the Recipes folder.

9.Adding more sub-folders is a snap. All you have to do is highlight the Chicken folder by clicking on it once and then click Create Folder. You will see your new folder appear under the Chicken folder and inside the Recipes folder. Call this one Lamb or Salmon or anything else you like. You can go on adding folders like this until you have all you need. You can also add more at a later date just by following the same process.

Before we finish, let's just check that you have everything working as it should. Go to this page http://www.all-about-cooking.com/chicken (if a box drops down with my picture on it click the little 'x' in the top right corner to get rid of it) and click on Favorites followed by Add to Favorites.

Scroll down in the window that appears and click on the little [+] next to Recipes, then Chicken and finally the OK button in the top right corner. That's it, you're done. You now have a complete chicken recipe collection neatly stored in your favorites file that you can access any time you like. And of course you can add as many different web pages or individual recipes as you wish by following the same simple procedure. Just get into the habit of clicking the Favorites button whenever you find a recipe you like and you need never be surrounded by bits of paper again.