Recipe Database

I know I'm going to get some eye-rolls and snickering for this post, but for my fellow Type A personalities, I feel compelled to share this idea. I just sent a copy of this to my BFF (who doesn't hesitate to tease me for my OCD ways) and even she thinks it's genius.

So what am I talking about? I'm so glad you asked.

Whenever I have a random ingredient leftover from a recipe, I try finding another recipe to use up the rest of that item. (i.e. cilantro, mushrooms, seasonal vegetables from the co-op) Sometimes I find a use for the leftovers, but often I give it away to a neighbor or worse, throw it away after it goes bad.

I decided to make myself an Excel spreadsheet of all of my go-to recipes for easy reference. I pasted the list of main dishes from the recipes section at the top of my blog into the first column of Excel. As an added bonus, it pasted the links to each recipe. Then I typed most of the ingredients into the rest of the columns in groups (meat, vegetable, sauce, etc).

I planned on stopping there and just doing a key word search based on the ingredients I wanted to find, but my Excel-genius husband peeked over my shoulder and offered to set up a database of the items in each column. He created a drop down menu under "meat," for example, and I can click on "ground beef" and all of the recipes with ground beef pop up. Or I can search for both chicken and green beans and all recipes with both ingredients appear.

This little spreadsheet is awesome. And I want to share it with the world...

Recipe Database

This is the first time I've ever attached a document like this, and I don't know why, but the pull down menus next to each category disappears when I saved it to Google Docs. Hmmm...I'll have to mess with it. But hopefully that gives you an idea of what I'm talking about.

When I have time, I'll do more research and figure out how to attach it so you can save the spreadsheet directly onto your desktop. Does anyone know how to do that?!?!

In the meantime, if you download the spreadsheet to your desktop, the recipe links won't hyperlink, but I can walk you through how to set up the database.

- Highlight row 3 by clicking on the number 3 on the far left side of the screen
- Click on the "Data" pull down menu
- Click on "Filter" then select "Autofilter"

That should give you a little arrow next to each category in the third row. Click on the arrow and select anything from the list below. You can add or delete recipes, ingredients, anything you want. It's going to be a handy little feature!