Top Three Food Magazines II: Paper or Electrons?

While writing about the Accidental Locavore’s top three food magazines, the little voice in the back of my head kept saying, but how do people read food magazines? Are they schizophrenic like you, using both paper and e-reader versions? Do they stick to one format? Which one? What if you want to save a recipe from your e-reader (actually, if anyone can answer that, it would be great!)? Do you go to the website and save it from there? Are there magazines you only read in paper and others you only read electronically?

With food magazines, although they’re usually downloaded to my iPad, I usually read them in paper form. It’s easier to dog-ear pages to save, but I often wonder if it wouldn’t be easier just to save them on the cloud so I can pull them up whenever and wherever I need them. Other, non-food magazines I tend to read online because I’m just reading the articles and tossing the magazines.

Which brings us to another question, how many forms and/or files do you keep recipes in? The Locavore has cookbooks, binders with recipes in two different locations, several different files on the computer (stored on the cloud) and probably a few bookmarked on the Internet. The issue with all of that is organization. Although I have the best intentions of organizing both physical and computer files in a more comprehensive manner than “recipes,” it looks like a lot of work! I’ve always wished that if you bought a cookbook from Amazon (or someone), you could access an e-version for a small (like $5) up-charge. That way, if you saw something you felt like making, or if you were at a market and saw great looking _______, you could pull up the recipe, making sure you bought all the necessary ingredients (in a perfect world, I’d be able to access an inventory list of what was in fridge and pantry to make sure that there were chickpeas and five-spice powder…).

So maybe in writing this, I’ve answered my own question and will endeavor to start saving everything to the cloud. In 45 minutes I found, copied and saved about 15 recipes, discovering along the way that Martha Stewart’s website is much pickier about spelling than Food & Wine’s. Anyone surprised? The file that was in the cloud as “recipes” got sorted out in another half-hour. In doing that, a great carrot salad recipe was found and made, with some of the carrots from Stokes Farms. Perfect with steak tartare on a very hot evening!