One of my bêtes noires has been growing for several years.

It’s a heap of recipes, printed out from websites, torn from newspapers and gathered from all sorts of places.

Now and again, I have an organising session and a bit of a clear out, putting those recipes I have used or wish to keep into plastic wallets and filing them in a couple of large folders. Those which don’t fit for some reason are placed inside a filing box alongside, but over the months, there grows a heap of paper on the top and the system - such as it is - overwhelms me.

Those plastic wallets have spawned a secondary bête noire because over time, the plastic decomposes and that area of the kitchen worktop is usually covered in fine particles of plastic - something that I find especially annoying - and the wallets need replacing.

The thing is, we have quite a collection of recipes here and there, for adjacent to the cutting collection, there’s a few favourite books on the shelf, amiably supervised by our bear Hobson, his pet mouse and the small, smartly dressed bear who arrived from who knows where and who now lives on the shelf too.

Unsurprisingly, there are more books elsewhere in the house. Downstairs, in our studio can be found several shelves of old favourites, new additions and seasonal titles.

Quite a few of these are used infrequently and I can name a couple from which we only ever refer to one single recipe. Another bête noire then, those books which take up shelf space because there’s a single page that I wouldn’t be without. Yes, Gordon Ramsay, your Great Escapes book is one of them - the Chicken Biryani is so good but we have other favourite Indian recipes from other sources.

For some time, I’ve been trying to find a means of digitising my recipe collection. Every time I see a recipe online, I try not to print it out, but to save it in a folder. But then, I go to make the dish and find that it’s so much easier to work from a printed copy…and yes, you know where that printed copy ends up, don’t you?

When my Hero asked what I’d like for my last birthday, I said I’d like some kind of recipe app. He spent quite some time trying to find one which would not only store online recipes, but which would also offer the facility to scan and save handwritten notes. After all, I have quite a few written in my Mum’s handwriting and several from friends too. I wouldn’t want to discard those.

He - we - drew a blank and the heap of papers in the kitchen grew.

With my birthday approaching once again, I reissued my wish, prompted by the appearance of a new cooking app in one of our newspapers. On my birthday morning, I opened - amongst some other surprises - a straightforward, no-nonsense “kitchen” tablet, which will become our digital cookbook. The idea is that I will save online recipes as I come across them, will use the onboard camera to scan printed recipes from my collection and from my books and be able to subscribe to Feast and other similar apps from there too. As I made a list of sources, I realised that I often use my Readly app to look through food magazines too, so added that app as well.

Over the next few days I gave some thought to how I might set up this collection, for it was not going to work if I was unable to find a specific recipe when I needed it, regardless of what format it was in. I searched for some suggestions for tagging, sorting and organisation and came across this. Well, clearly, I wasn’t going to be the first person to want to do this, was I?

It’s going to take time. Over the next few days I made a start and began identifying recipes from that pile of paper that have an online source. Having found that, I saved to pdf and began to build a collection of folders on the “kitchen tablet”. It will surely change and develop as it grows but for now, I have a bit of a workflow and the heap of paper is slowly disappearing.

The best thing is, however many recipes I add, the “kitchen tablet” will not take up any more space, it won’t shed small pieces of plastic over the worktop and I hope, we’ve found the holy grail of recipe storage at last!

Just one thing. We can’t continue calling it the “kitchen tablet”, can we? More creative ideas are welcome!