Many of my favorites have come from the folks here on the CF. But I also have some great recipes that I have gotten from all of the other sources you mentioned as well.

I think you can go back a long way, but you probably have to know exactly what you are looking for.

It's a lot easier to just ask if you are looking for something in particular. No one minds posting or re-posting a favorite!

Linda

I get many of mine from the CF. I subscribe to most all the cooking magazines and do get some recipes from them but since I discovered the CF I trust the T&T recipes that are posted here and use a lot of them or save to try later.

I have been trying to "cull" magazines that have accumulated over a long period of time. At first I was still saving the cooking magazines but once I got started, Bon Appetit, Cooking Light, Cook's Magazine etc. are going to recycle as well. I will probably hold on to the more recent ones for a while. I do thumb thru them when they first come with grand plans to try some of the recipes, but often don't seem to get around to doing that.

I subscribe to Cuisine at Home which I like and occasionally order one of their more specialized cookbooks. I just received "Cuisine tonight Favorites" a quick and easy meals version and it looks very interesting. Recipes are grouped by category...chicken, beef, pork, seafood and vegetarian and the recipes are for a complete meal, salad, side etc. I think it was $9.95 and a second one for $5.95 which I gave to one of my daughters.

jude

Oddly enough, some of my best recipes come off boxes, bags and cans of food and bags of flour. I too have my CF favorites and my cookbook favorites. I love to try online and magazine recipes too. And then recipes I get from friends and family. A lot of time I just wing stuff though.

Karen:
I do mostly Home Style cooking, so I don't use recipes,too often.
Picked up a lot of info here on the CF.
I like to try different things, winging it. Usually turn out good.
Most Recipes are locked in my brains PC, from way back when.
I think one of the first things I cooked was Dinosaur Legs.
They tasted like Chicken!!!
Lou

Thanks Linda, I haven't wanted to ask for a recipe that I'm sure has been posted before and the search feature doesn't work very well for me. Since everyone is so nice on CF I guess I will just ask for a recipe and hope no one minds repeating it or perhaps can send me to a thread to find it.

Lou..Dinosaur Legs sound really interesting!!!

Jude...what is your favorite cooking magazine? Cuisine at Home?

Karen

My MIL's church circle published several really wonderful cookbooks years ago. All the Southern classics. And then there's the book that I helped put together at my kids' elementary school -- a complilation of all the parents' best recipes. These "community cookbooks" are really the best!

I noticed a post recently by someone (dkarch maybe? and did I spell that correctly??) that said he/she had just recently discovered Southern Living Magazine. lol For many years, SL was my cooking bible. The instructions were so clear that even a novice like me could follow them. And, unlike with Gourmet or Bon Appetit, the results were guaranteed to be good. They're not quite as on the top of their game as they used to be, but I probably have 20 recipes gleaned from SL over the years that are at the top of my family's hit parade. Still a very good magazine, especially for inexperienced cooks aince they test stuff multiple times to make sure it's foolproof.

As far as the internet goes, I have a couple of gems from allrecipes, plus a few from epicurious and Pioneer Woman. The bulk of the 'keepers', though, are from recipezaar. I've found it to be the most comprehensive food site on the web. Of course, now it's food.com and it stinks, but still...

I've collected cookbooks for years.
Probably have 2 or 3 hundred, maybe more.
I particularly like those put out by different organizations as fund raisers.
I have them from all over the USA.
I get a lot of good recipes from them.
And a lot more of what I call 'starter' ideas.
I've also gotten several recipes here on the CF.
And a number of other websites.
And then there are the "Like Mother made it" dishes.
Not really recipes, just dishes she made.

Lots of times my main dishes start with just an idea.
Things I think might go good together.
The real and original style of "home cooking".

I usually follow recipes pretty exact in baking.
The first time I make them, anyhow.
But in other dishes, I usually just 'wing it'.
Using one or more of the above sources as the base.

Rusty

I get recipes here and I use Allrecipes a lot.

Most of the recipes I use come from here, from friends, Sunday School class members, Gourmet, Bon Appetit and some old Southern Living recipes. I haven't enjoyed many of Southern Living's recipes in the past few years. I have a lot of cookbooks, rarely use a recipe from them. I have taken Cooks Illustrated for a number of years and I don't believe I have ever used one of their recipes. I tried some from Cooking Light and didn't care for most of them. I once saw a Fine Cooking mag in a doctor's office that had a number of really good looking recipes in it so I subscribed to it for three years. During that time, nothing I saw in them looked as good as the one in the Dr's office and I never used any of them.

Is this where I have to confess to being a real recipe junkie? I have somewhere around 900 cookbooks and files upon files of clipped recipes. I have my GM's collection, my DM's collection and I followed their lead and started my own collection about 40 years ago. I think I have just about every issue of Cooks Illustrated and several years worth of Fine Cooking and Gourmet.

All this and most of the time I don't even use a recipe. But I love reading cookbooks and more recently, reading blogs.

Some of my current favorite recipes have come from this site, our Cooking Forum has some outstanding cooks that share their recipes. So I'll repeat what someone else already said, just ask!

Nancy

Oh dear. Like Nancy, I've collected cookbooks for eyars, incliding a lot of the old "Farm Journal" ones. I've got a couple hundred, probably.

Many of my recipes I get from here and some come from magazines. Unlike some other posters, I like Cooking Light and so I got some of my favorites from there. and finally, some I've had all my life, Grandma raised me and taught me to cook and I still use her recipes for apple butter, sweet relish, blueberry crisp, farmhouse white bread, rhubarb pie, molasses cookies.

Don't hesitate to ask for a recipe, most of us don;t mind posting it again and even if the original poster doesn't see the request someone will and many of us will post those other recipes again too.

Annie

Annie, I'm glad you mentioned the Farm Journal cookbooks. I bought several of them through the old Cook Book Guild -- you know, get 5 for $1 each and then buy a few more during the next year. I accumulated a lot of cookbooks that way as a newlywed in the late 60s and early 70s, and I still refer to all them. Junior League and community cookbooks have been good sources of great recipes. My all-time favorite reference book is my 1968 Joy of Cooking. Some editions since then omitted our favorite recipes and "About..." sections, but they seemed to have returned to their senses with the recent one.

Thanks to everyone. This is becoming a very interesting thread.

I too collect cookbooks. I don't have as many as some of you however, I rarely make anything from them. Just enjoy reading them. I really love using recipes from people like you that I know has made it and it's good. Maybe that's because I don't have time to try all those recipes in the books.

I have a a book "Top Secret Restaurant Recipes" that I have made a couple of recipes from and surprisingly they were wonderful. One especially good was Romano's Macaroni Grill Chicken Scaloppine. It was great.

I use allrecipes and recipesource out on the net when I'm looking for something in particular.

Like Annie, I have some family favorites from my mother and pull them out often. Along with these recipes come the memmories which for me are priceless.

I too have a lot o organization/school recipe books. They are really fun to read and sometimes I will try something.

I have a 3-ring binder that is full of recipes that I've either cut out of magaizine or made copies of. It's such a mess that it takes hours to find something I'm looking for. Any ideas on how to organize such a mess?

Oh, by the way, my love of cooking and eating has increased immensely since I've found CF and I've gained 5 pounds. Yeeks!!!!

Karen

Karen:
Want to just chime in here and let you know about the FAQ link at the top of this page...click there and a lot of the cook alongs are there with some good recipes broken down by "food item" ie: carrots, lemon, potatoes etc.
That is where I find a lot of the recipes these wonderful people share. Especially good if you have an ingredient and are looking for a new way of cooking it.
Also I too hope someone has an idea of how to organize a 3 ring binder. I had my recipes all separated out by category with tabbed dividers but over time it has become a mess again and needs some TLC. LOL Just don't understand how that happens!
Murphy

Here, allrecipes and other internet sources, magazines, friends, and hand me downs from mom/grandma.

I tend to select my recipes based on having simple ingredients (I want to be able to find them at my local store) and that we like all the ingredients in the recipe. I particularly like to try things that I never thought would go together as I've learned I'm often pleasantly surprised.

Also magazine recipes are rare that I actually like, I don't know why, but for some reason they just don't seem to work out for us. I only have a handful that originally came from a magazine that I'm still using.

Pretty much repeating what's been said above, but magazines, cookbooks, internet and of course, here. I have a BIG stack of recipes I've cut out of magazines (and newspapers) which I'm going to try, "someday"! I keep vowing to go through that one by one and either make each recipe or throw it away. Maybe I'll start THIS WEEK! :)

I use local cookbooks, and I get a lot of recipes here, too. I also love to look at cooking/food blogs that some people here
have. Like Ann_T's, and All that Splatters and lots more. They are great!

I have never been disappointed in one of AnnT's recipes.

My husband finds it amusing that I love cookbooks so much, but rarely can leave a recipe alone. It's a compulsion. Perhaps someone will conduct a study some day on folks who feel compelled to alter recipes...perhaps they will discover a mutant gene or weird, misfired chemical in the brain?

Really, though, I read recipes, and use them for ideas, as guides for cooking times, proportions of ingredients etc, but I rarely just follow them. The exception is when I'm making something I have never tasted, and so need to know what it is "supposed" to taste like before I mess with it. Oh, and baking cakes...I don't bake them often enough to know what I'm doing without a recipe.

Most of the recipes I post in this forum are my own, that I have written up from things I've made for years. Friends have complained that I can't give them the recipe for this or that, and so I've begun jotting down ingredient amounts as I cook and try to write out method notes later. It's rough going, because I'm easily distracted and forget to write or measure, then I have to wait until the next time I make the dish to try again.

Here is my process. IÂll get interested in learning to cook some general class of dish  say, braised beef dishes, steamed fish dishes, grilled chicken dishes, etc. IÂll consult my cookbooks, maybe read a Cooks Illustrated issue, and find the most basic version of the dish, with the minimum of ingredients and spices.

IÂll make that very simple dish a couple of times and develop a feel for the basic process. How does the cooking method transform the essential ingredient food through heat, moisture, and time. Hopefully IÂll learn to make a basic but tasty version of the dish and understand what is happening. Then IÂll start trying different variations with additional flavours and secondary ingredients.

I donÂt usually start off with a CF recipe. Usually (my personal observation) those are pretty ÂÂdevelopedÂÂ recipes with lots of ingredients. I have no doubt that they taste terrific, but I wonder how much I will learn, fundamentally, from diving right in at the deep end. For my personal learning experience, I need to start in the kiddie pool. Rather than add a bunch of coriander to the tomato, first make it with just tomatoes and then learn what the coriander adds to the taste.

Admittedly my main interest is in cooking protein (meat, poultry, fish) which might reward a different process than if I were mainly interested in veg or grains (?).

I have a large cookbook collection that I never bother with any more. If I want to try something new I get ideas here on the CF and on other blogs as well as just doing a Google search.

Ann

I agree with at least some of all of the above. I just can't resist buying a cookbook that looks interesting. If it has pictures of the recipes, it's like the food that's posted on CF...looks so good you just want to try it. Sometimes I lie down until that urge passes.LOL

Nancy, I can't tell you how good it makes me feel to learn you have around 900 cookbooks. I'm probably in the 300+ category but there's every cooking magazine in the world stacked here and there that I'm trying to be brutal and get rid of...tons of back issues. When DH complained they were in every chair and on every table, I told him it was cheaper than therapy.

I too have subsribed to a magazine based on a recipe I saw only to find I didn't really care for it. I don't usually like recipes that call for hard to find ingredients, or complicated instructions so I won't renew them.

Karen, I do like Cuisiine at Home but I also like Cooks Country (far better that Cooks Illustrated), like Southern Living for the gardening articles as much as the recipes
but often I never get around to trying a lot of them. I have saved many of the CF recipes either on my computer or have printed them and I try a lot of them. DH is rather narrow in the kinds of food he likes so that influences what I cook.

jude