How to organise your recipes from links, screenshots and cookbooks

Most of us collect recipes everywhere: bookmarks, saved social posts, screenshots, cookbooks, a handwritten card from a relative. Then when it's time to cook, we can't find any of them. Getting your recipes into one place makes planning and cooking far easier.

1. Gather everything

Spend half an hour collecting the recipes you actually cook or genuinely want to try. Go through your bookmarks, saved posts and photos. Be ruthless: if you saved it two years ago and never made it, let it go.

2. Put them in one place

Whether you use an app, a notes document or a binder, the important thing is having a single home. Recipes scattered across five apps are recipes you won't cook.

3. Organise by how you choose meals

• By mealtime: breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks
• By time: quick weeknight meals versus weekend cooking
• By main ingredient: chicken, fish, beans, tofu, eggs
• By favourites: the ten meals everyone in your house loves

4. Make them plannable

A recipe collection is most useful when it's connected to your meal plan and grocery list. Knowing the ingredients, servings and nutrition for each recipe means you can drop it into a week and know exactly what to buy.

How Mealful helps

Mealful can turn almost anything into a recipe. Paste a link, paste or describe a recipe in your own words, or snap a photo of a dish or a cookbook page, and it writes up the ingredients, steps and nutrition for you. You can also type one in by hand. Every recipe you add can go straight into your plan, with its ingredients merged into your grocery list.