Taming (0rganizing) periodicals

[snowangel]

I have a ton of cooking magazines. Oh, and a stack of newspaper sections. With the newspapers, it is easy -- generally, I only want one or two recipes from each section, which I cut, and which languish in my recipe box (which I go through when a kid is home sick, wondering why in the heck I bothered to cut and file the recipe).

But, the magazines. Many of these subscriptions no longer come with an annual index. Sometimes I just pick up an issue of a magazine at the grocery.

Further magazine frustration: the recipe is split between few pages. Then, there's the "paid advertisement" pages, which don't have page numbers, and make it hard to follow the recipe, or article.

So, do you save magazines? How do you find that one recipe or article you have to find? Where do you store them (besides under the bed)? I'm tempted to haul the lot off to Half Price Books and regret it later.

[Pierogi]

Arrrrrrghhhhhh.........a sore spot to be sure.

I generally (broad term, that) handle the magazine recipes the same way I handle the newspaper clippings. If there is/are recipe/s I want, I cut them out, tape them together if they're in pieces (damn those publications anyway.......errrrr) and file them in my recipe box for all eternity.

When I'm reading the magazine, I dog ear the page I'm intersted in. If I find a majority of the pages in the magazine folded, then the whole thing gets saved. Otherwise, I sit down about once every 3 months or so and cut and paste. I'll have ripped out the pages I'm interested in (hopefully having remembered to have taken all those far distant jumps.......), recycled the rest, and I trim and tape and file.

Very occasionally there will be, out of the gate, an issue that is focused on a single topic I'm interested in. One that comes to mind is an ancient Savuer about Louisianna cuisine. Those, I know as soon as I see them that I'll be keeping the whole thiing.

Unless its Cooks Illustrated. They always get saved, whole, pristine, as is.

But ripping, clipping and then taping is the only way I've found to keep me from having a house that is completely furnished with cooking magazines. Which is not a look I see any of the top interior designers touting as the next hot thing. At least no time soon.

[nibor]

I cut out recipes and tape them onto pages in a 3-ring binder. Every couple of years, in the middle of a cleaning fit, I throw out all of the pages containing recipes I have subsequently never bothered to try. Which is usually most of them.

This is sort of like cleaning your clothes closet using the "if you haven't worn it in the last year get rid of it" rule.

[Anna N]

I always keep Fine Cooking although if I came across one of their hard-bound annuals at a garage sale or charity store I would soon discard that year's copies!

But Bon Appetit and Gourmet now routinely get passed on as the recipes appear on-line at epicurious.com within a month of publication. I mark the recipes I want with sticky notes and then download them when the new issue hits the newstands.

I used to be a real fan of Cook's Illustrated and have many, many issues but it's starting to really bore me now and I rarely buy it.

The magazines I keep are stored in those plastic magazine holders that I often find at garage sales.

Newspapers are no longer a problem since I don't subscribe to any.

At least FC still makes an annual index!

[Margo]

I keep a running index as a Word document on my computer. Each magazine gets its own: Saveur, Fine Cooking, and Cook's Illustrated (which I no longer subscribe to, but keep the old issues around). As the current issue comes in, I write the recipe names, volume number, and page into the alphabetical list. Sometimes I get fancy and cross-reference, sometimes I just add the new vol/page to an existing heading (roast chicken, for example, has about a dozen variations in the Fine Cooking index).

Sometimes I'm really anal and index everything, sometimes I just put in things I'm likely to try or want to find again.

It's kind of a pain to keep up, but it seems like most of my new recipes come from Fine Cooking, so it's worth it in the end.

The bookshelf space is becoming a problem, maybe, but I always end up paging through and enjoying whatever old issue I've unearthed.

[JAZ]

Fine Cooking has an online index here. Since that's the only magazine I subscribe to or keep, it makes my life very easy.

[birder53]

I purchased the magazine holders for my Fine Cooking collection. The Quick and Easy pull-outs are in a three-ring binder. The magazines are stored by season as are the Q&E sections. The on-line index is a big help in addition to the annual indexes. But I also add my favorite recipes to a Recipe folder in Word so I can find them easily. Even so, I can still waste lots of time looking for a specific recipe.

I stopped saving recipes from newspapers when I realized that I never used them. We eat well here thanks to Fine Cooking!

[Toliver]

I rip as I read. That way I was able to get rid of a lot of magazines that were hanging around cluttering up my home. Cook's Illustrated is the exception.

Why don't magazines offer a year-end recap on CD? If Bon Appetit offered a year-end CD with every issue from that year saved on the CD as PDF files (include the ads, I don't care), it would save me so much time and space. Then I could print out the recipe as I use them or re-read the issues at my leisure without having to search for a particular issue in storage.

[suzilightning]

i copy out the recipes i'm interested in then save the mags up to send as a "little extra something" when i have FREE cookbooks to give away.

you might try getting some Princeton files like the ones we use in the library to store magazines and definitely they should be alphabetical and chronological. good luck, susan.