When I was in my teens and getting ready to leave home for university mum made sure I had basic cooking skills and I knew a few recipes to get me started, but knowing how much I liked food I started looking out for recipes I could try.  I wasn’t a confident cook, but just cooking for myself meant if I messed it up I wasn’t facing someone else’s judgement or disappointment.  This was the mid-90s, and being a student I would often be home in time for shows such as “Ready, Steady, Cook!” in which two contestants brought in £5 worth of ingredients and two chefs had the challenge of making the best dish in the allotted time.  You could go over to Ceefax (this was before the internet!) and get the recipe, so I started copying them down onto file cards.  My recipe collection was born!

Twenty-odd years later and my collection has grown and been refined.  Some of the recipes I looked at and figured I was never going to make (napoleon of smoked salmon with caviar and vinaigrette anyone?) and they were culled, but most of them are recipes I go back to again and again as the seasons change.  You can see the ones that are from my student days, for they are faded and neatly written, while others are used regularly and are splattered and splashed with the fruits of my labour.

To be honest, apart from the truly pretentious recipes I tend not to get rid of any unless they are not to my taste, because I see them as a comment on where I was on my cooking journey.  Most of my collection are wholesome family meals, the kind of thing I can make after a hard day at work or when we have friends and family round for dinner.  There’s a lot of chicken and pasta recipes, because they are cheap, filling and usually easy to make.  As I gained confidence and had more financial stability, we see recipes for lamb or game, and many of the fish recipes come from when I lived in Devon and ran a seaside bed and breakfast with Mum, and we’d pop to the local fishmongers to see what had been landed at Brixham that morning; if it was a fish we hadn’t tried before they would bring out folders from under the table and offer us printouts of recipes.  Now that is customer service!

Most of my recipes are kept on these file cards in two boxes; one for main courses and one for starters, desserts, breads and so on.  I’ll give you a full list of subjects at the end, in case you want to organise your kitchen in this way too.  The advantage is you can pull out the card and have it handy, and you can build your collection to suit what you and your family eat.  I do of course have several cookbooks by various chefs and cooks, and I try to pick a recipe out of one of them every week to have a go at, else they end up being food-based decor rather than a practical source of inspiration.

My cookbook shelfie

As you can see, there are certain cooks and chefs that suit my style, most noticeably Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver; in fact “The Return Of The Naked Chef” was the very first thing I bought on the internet, which shows how my interest was growing when I bought my first house.  The yellow folders on the end contain recipe cards I picked up for free in supermarkets, or ones I printed off the internet or tore out of magazines.  I also have an A5 hardback notebook I bought years ago, which I copied some of my recipes into thinking it would be neater and easier to have them in a book than on cards.  For the record, it’s not, unless you like a recipe for Algarve-style squid sandwiched in between a recipe for fruity Italian trifle and steak and Guinness pie, but I need to be able to organise recipes logically based on what I fancy or what I need to use up so file cards it is.

Interestingly I have seen posh versions of these in the shops in recent years, and for an absolute fortune.  However if you want to give it a go you can buy basic boxes and cards very cheaply and personalise them to match your style and your kitchen, so if you want to have a go think about what sorts of food you like to cook and divide your boxes up accordingly.

Maybe you already have a collection of your favourite recipes, in which case how do you file them?  Are they all in folders, or have you switched to the digital age?  Let me know in the comments below!

• Starters
• Soups
• Breads
• Cakes
• Vegetables
• Desserts
• Oils and Vinegars
• Pasta dishes
• Poultry
• Seafood
• Lamb
• Beef
• Pork
• Game
• Vegetarian
• Side dishes and accompaniments
• Sabbats
• Christmas
• Mince dishes
• Tapas
• Oriental
• Comfort food
• Afternoon tea
• Party food and drink
• Cocktails