Organizing Cooking Ideas

Every week there is the same big question. What am I going to cook next week? As I really enjoy cooking, this makes it even more difficult: should I try something new, make some of my favorites or try to perfect a recipe/technique? There is also the factor of availability of ingredients and seasonality. On the other hand, sometimes I think I haven't made a certain dish for a long time, but then I completely forget about it when I'm planning.
Now, how can you solve this problem? Cooking is basically project management, right? So Trello to the rescue. It's not intended to be a recipe database, but has proven to work nicely over the last decade to manage my kitchen projects. Over the last year I then also adopted it for my daily use, using mainly four basic lists: ideas, weekly plan, shopping and done.

In the ideas list, as the name suggests, I add every idea that comes to mind, so that they are not getting lost. I roughly sort them based on, what I want to do next. This list has now over 120 entries, so going forward I probably need to introduce tags to organize them further.

In the weekly plan list, I put the recipes that I want to do in the upcoming week and put them in an order. This gives an good overview what ingredients need to be bought and what can be prepped in advance. Of course this sometimes get shuffled around, but having a 1-2 dishes that don't have highly perishable ingredients in rotation makes this quite doable. Another thing is to plan at least a day to use up left over ingredients.

The shopping list contains more or less everything needs to be bought. Normally I make separate lists for the different stores/markets and the day of shopping.

The done list just a big collection of recipes and projects that I've done. Now here is where you slowly notice that Trello is not made for long term recipe storage, but using tags and search makes it still pretty usable. If I make a recipe again I just move it from done again to weekly plan. This has the advantage that more and more information and notes are added about the recipe over time.

Bigger or long-term projects usually get their own list, or even a board. The ability to put due dates on cards is also very handy to remind yourself when, for example, a long-term fermentation process needs to be checked. This system works really well and as a side effect I now actually have a decently organized collection of recipes that I have actually tried and a way to add notes when making them again. It also gives me a way to save copies of all the online recipes.

Then there is the issue of trying new recipes from all the new cook books, but that is a story for another day.