I’ve never been a great cook or really known what I was doing in the kitchen, but the last few years I’ve been really determined to learn and to get better. I’ve made a lot of progress! The big development for me came from having a cookbook that I ~wanted to use.

I started with Chrissy’s Cravings and I’ve continued the trend with Smitten Kitchen, Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible, Damn Delicious, Brown Sugar Kitchen, and a few others. I plan to be a cookbook lady the rest of my life. It works for me. I occasionally check some out from the library just to try a few recipes, learn, and get inspired.

Here’s the problem. I’m also a millennial. Which means I rely on Pinterest for my recipes a lot. I’ve cultivated hundred of recipes that look good in multiple categories all over the internet. Not to mention I have some random recipes I’ve torn out of magazines, printed off, or written down from family favorites.

Another problem: my type A brain reeeeeeeeeeally doesn’t like having all of these recipes all over the place. My type A brain cringes at the inefficiency of mindlessly perusing my Pinterest for dinner ideas because I’ve made chicken and rice for the last week. My type A brain feels the need to scour my categorized boards and pull out my growing stack of cookbooks every time I need to take something to a party or event, or when I feel like a certain seasonal meal or the perfect side.

I actually love using my cookbooks as I cook. There’s so many great things about having recipes on Pinterest. My main issue was *knowing* what I had and being able to search by category, type, etc. Sometimes I need a carrot side dish. Sometimes I want to make something very fall-themed. Sometimes I want an appetizer that is good to take to a party.

I don’t need all of the actual recipes in one spot. And I don’t need all of the actual recipes on paper. I don’t care about the meal planning functionality of some apps – I prefer to do that in my own planner. I have my own system for shopping lists, too. I just really wanted a way to catalog recipes with searchability, filters, and categorization. After much research and experimentation… I think I’ve found it.

I found Copy Me That via Reddit. It’s FREE, so that’s always nice. You can enter in recipes manually, or you can find any recipe on the internet, click the Chrome extension, and it will automatically copy and add the recipe to your account!

I am currently in the process of loading all of my cookbook recipes into the system now. Basically all of them can be found somewhere online. I flip through a cookbook and every time I find a recipe I liked or want to try I find it on their blog or google it and then hit the button to copy it over. On the rare occasion I can’t find it online, I simply type in the title of the recipe and in the description I write the cookbook and page number.

Then I meticulously tag each recipe. I’m maybe a little over the top. I categorize by course (appetizers, mains, etc), meal (breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, snacks, desserts), season, if it’s party-worthy, good for a dinner party because it feeds more than just my family, if it’s good for meal prepping, if it’s a good last minute recipe, crock pot, instant pot, main ingredients, and even more because I’m insufferable.

Voila. I need to bring a vegetable side to a dinner? I want to make a fall-inspired dessert? I’m ready to meal prep for a busy week? I hit a couple of those tags as my filters and Copy Me That brings up everything I have logged that fits the categories. THEN I have the option to do it right there from the site or to go pull out the cookbook it’s in.

Copy Me That also allows you to meal plan and create shopping lists, too. I’m sure there are even more features that I’ll discover as I continue using it. Mostly I’m just excited to have a searchable database! I want to break out of the rut of making the same 5-6 recipes or hauling out a huge stack of cookbooks before a holiday season to plan out everything I’ll make and take to our festivities.

My lil organization heart is so happy. 2020 should give us some goooooood eats.