Really I think I get more ideas then recipes form magazines, cook books and on-line. I usually play around with them and come up with something similar but not exact. I would say that is about 70% of where I get them.
I would say 5% is from friends.
The other 25% I get from my Mom (which includes grandmother's recipes as well). And those I try to do to the letter.

T

The majority of my recipes come from my head. Occasionally I'll see a recipe and tweak it, but most of what the new things I cook happens in the moment as I work.

40% Websites (marthastewart.com, allrecipes.com, MOSTLY other peoples' food blogs)
30% Cookbooks (including magazines)
20% My own (sudden bursts of inspiration! :b)
10% Other (family, friends)

:)

Lately, most of my recipes (80%) come from cookbooks, although some (12%) come from cooking magazines. Sometimes (8%), I'll remake recipes I see on other blogs to suit my preferences/restrictions. Hope this helps!

70% magazines - Husband bought me all of the back issues of Cook's Illustrated for the birthday last year, and there is *nothing* those people have not attacked. I do not always follow the recipes to the letter, but they seem to function as reliable guideposts.

15% cookbooks

10% Internet (mostly epicurious and Alton Brown's recipes on Food Network)

5% Mom

I guess around
30% cookbooks
40% internet
10% magazines
20% my own concoctions, sometimes from remembered things. I have a terrible habit of reading something on a blog, then losing it and having to either make it up, go insane or try to forget about it.

Some concoctions are a mix of everything I have on hand

Um. This is hard because I almost never make recipes exactly as written, so I'm not sure how exacting a process this is. (Heck, we're all guessing anyway, right?)

40% Alton Brown (in print or on TV)
40% inspired by what's in the fridge
10% cook books and foodie magazines
10% family recipes

That last 20% covers most of the baking.

When I use a "recipe" from a source other than my own brain, I usually consider it more an outline or list of suggestions, rather than something that must be followed to a T.

That said, currently I'd say:

50% magaizines (working through back issues of Gourmet, Sunset, Food & Wine, so I can justify the subscription to Cook's Illustrated I really want)
20% made up by me
15% websites (primarily epicurious.com)
10% cookbooks
5% family or friends

Depending on what I'm doing (dinner for the family, dinner for friends, something to take to a potluck) the percentages vary a lot, but it all averages out to that.

I'd say about 80% from magazines, mostly Cooking Light (although I'd say you have to really like to cook to use them - usually a lot of ingredients. I never recommend that mag to anyone who's just trying to get a meal on the table.) The other 20% is from my vast collection of cookbooks (reading them is like therapy for me!). And no recipe gets put into my recipe box unless both my husband and I agree that it was worth having again.

About 25% books, 25% Internet sources like food blogs and Google searches, 10% family, and 40% things I've devised, memorized, or slapped together.

Just found your site and loving it!

60% family and friends. If I eat it at a dinner party and love, I usually go home with the recipe.
10% cooking shows on Food Network
20% Internet and food blogs
10% personal inspiration...but that usually only happens in the summer when their is a bigger variety of veggies and berries to cook with.

I don't really follow recipes so much as use them as a template to freestyle upon, but I'd say 30% TV, 30% magazines/newspapers, 20% cookbooks, 20% ideas from friends/family.

I'd say 30% family, 30% online, 15% TV, and 25% out of my own head.

I read many cooking magazines, and watch lots of food TV. Rarely do I actually follow a recipe verbatim. I more or less get the ideas from the media, and tweak them to my own satisfaction.

Here are my percentages:

- 75% online (recipe, food, brand web sites; blogs)

- 20% magazines

- 5% family, friends

I tweak many of the recipes to conform to my vegetarian lifestyle.

I'm going to go with 40% coming from the innards of my mind, 30% from my father, 20% cookbooks, and 10% the miraculous Internet. Recipes are more like a base than a source, though, an inspiration for days when I'm not sure what to make.

I'd say about half of my recipes were handed down from my mom and my dad, as both were avid cooks in their day. I've tweaked most of them to the point my own mother doesn't recognize them anymore. Another 1/4 I've just made up over the years, and the other 1/4 I get from cookbooks or websites/tv shows (Paula Deen and Giada DeLaurentis).

First - a question for you - what is the salt for when cleaning up raw egg???? Am I missing something here?

Second - in response to your question - 60% cookbooks & magazines (mostly Penzey's Spices mag), 20% friends & family, 20% internet

Probably
20% magazines or similar
40% school (chef school)
20% myself
20% Epicurious, maybe more ("Uh, I need to make alfredo... I'll go through Epicurious and see if any look good.")

70 percent magazines
20 percent online website
10 books

Wow, it's not as linear as it should be, I suspect.

I'm VERY visual. I SEE pictures of food and decide what the dish should be. There's a picture of a charred onion and white bean salad on the cover of Cooking Light magazine this month. Well, I needed a side dish for a dinner for six this past weekend. I remembered the picture, and looked up the recipe. Totally not what I needed. I needed a hot side. Okay. So I charred the onions in a pan I had used to brown the pork roast, then added the beans, some of the red wine vinegar and then wilted some spinach leaves in it.
Seasoned it appropriately for the meal I was serving. It all worked beautifully but it really was only INSPIRED by the magazine.

I easily get 50% of my recipes from visual cues in magazines, internet and Food Network. I get perhaps 40% from cookbooks where I actually follow the recipe because there's no picture interference. The rest are recipes I've been using "forever". Family recipes mainly, almost all of which I've adapted over time.

BTW, do you use salt to pick up a broken egg?

I use about 90% internet and 10% cookbooks.

Pixie - yes. I pour salt on the egg, much like I do a spill on my carpet, and it makes it much easier to wipe up.

Hi, I start with books but , more likely, just the title of the recipe. From there, I start to riff on my own and come up with what I want. thanks, mary

Usually my recipes are an amalgamation of several different online recipes. For instance, Saturday I made carbonara. I knew the boy wanted the super-creamy kind, but I like the more eggy kind, so I found two recipes and figured out a way to make them meet in the middle. Otherwise, Mom (5%), Joy of Cooking (10%, all the uber-basics) and How to Cook Everything (25%, although I'm having problems getting Bittman's yeast-based recipes to work lately!)

Usually the internet. I Google for a recipe for what I want to make, and then tweak it to suit me. Most of my stuff comes from Epicurious and Food and Wine.

50% web, sometimes a blog but mostly well-known websites for recipes like epicurious etc.

30% cookbooks

20% family and my own inspiration. Sometimes a recipe will be a guide to use when raiding the fridge. If I don't have an ingredient, I'll use what's available and compromise.

mostly from old interesting cookbooks, and update, before the convenience of take-out.

50% internet
45% my own thoughts
5% cook books

25% family
40% websites
15% Myself
10% Cookbooks
10% magazines

80%- Self w/ internet aid- Like a lot of other posters, I see something and make it, or try to duplicate something i think is good. I'll usually refer to a bunch of recipes on foodnetwork.com to get a general idea of ingredients, etc, then just run with it.

15%- Mom

5%- friends

0% Cookbooks- even though I own like 40 of them...

80% - online sites
10% - cookbooks
5% - magazines
5% - family

I am not good at just whipping something up, but I'm great at following a recipe. Usually I'll want to try something I've never made before, and will just look up the recipe online. Or, I'll use an ingredient search for things I have on hand, to see what comes up.

85% fambly, 5% from a girlfriend who can cook anything from her own knowledge, 5% from web sites, and 5% from other cookbooks.

If you have parents getting up in their years, a great idea is to put together a family cookbook - I refer to mine constantly.

Wish I knew where your restaurant is - recently relocated to the Pacific Northwest (Bellingham/Blaine), and we're always looking for a new place to eat.

Wow! Tough assignment! I would say about 15 % are from family and friends, 65% from net, magazines or cookooks (usually inspired by rather than 100% followed) and about 20% experimentation!

The answer to this question has changed in the past 5 years,,,,,

10% family & friends
50% online (recipezaar, cooks, southern living)
20% magazines
10% cookbooks
10% supermarket cooking cottage

I usually tweak the recipe to fit my tastes regardless where it comes from

95% websites
5%family and friends

I'd say 40% from books, 30% from family, 20 % from TV food shows and 10% from imitating soething from a restaurant.

Online 75%, Magazines 15%, Myself 10%

btw...Love your blog!

20% blogs and online
30% cookbooks (love cookbooks)
10% my mother/my family
15% myself
15% things I've eaten elsewhere that I've loved and try to imitate
5% NY Times
5% friends

And all of them end up modified under the influences of the others

www.caringbridge.org/visit/abbybridgewater
I get about 70 % of my recipes from friends or family (tried and true) 15% from cookbooks, but I have a GOB of cookbooks, and I get the rest from websites or magazines... I find with kids the ones that I am most 'successful' with are the ones I get from other moms! Hope this helps!

For me, it's been Magazines (Eating Well, predominantly) - about 80%. Lately though, I've been lurking online alot - so I'd say it's become: Online 30%, cookbooks 30%, magazine 40%. But I definately see a trend back to my fave, Eating Well, which really should be 75%.

Salt is better? I was taught to use flour. And no, I do not bake with it after that :-D

Been cooking for about thirty years. Now it's my own repeats: 50%. 20% newspaper columns, 10% magazine; 10% online; 10% imitations of favourite restaurant meals.

The way I cook has totally changed since I moved to France. In the States I watched cooking shows and got many ideas there. I devoured cooking magazines and have a huge file of recipes torn out of them. I used cookbooks, mainly my old one from the 60's, the Good Housekeeping Cookbook, and I relied on recipes from friends. Then I moved to France and have slowly been making my way-if the recipe strikes my fancy-through Mastering The Art of French Cooking by Julia. I will watch an occasional TV cooking show which might send me to the internet to find a similar recipe. I am often guided by what I have in my kitchen. I would say 70% of my cooking are old standbys that I have been making for years. I am on the Internet alot, many of them cooking ones such as Chocolate and Zuchinni, which will send me to the store or market with a recipe in hand. I'm in the boonies alot so if I don't have all of the ingredients for something, I punt and do the best I can. I cook with many more fresh ingredients here in France too-not as many canned or frozen ingredients-and my meals tend to be more simple and less rich than they once were.

70% internet, usually chowhound, epicurious, that sort of thing. Most of time I look up several recipes for one dish, take the best elements of all of them and then throw in a few of my own changes.
I used to rely more on cookbooks, but I moved to Australia recently and most of my collection are still in the States, so I'd say 20% on cookbooks now.
10% inspiration

leenaeats.com/blog

60% myself
10% mother
30% blogs, magazines, trying to recreate what I ate at restaurants

60% magazines
20% cookbooks
5% weekly food section of newspaper
15% inspired

I'm only awesome at creating in the kitchen when it comes to dying things. When it is my turn to cook, I get all of my recipes either out of a family cookbook that my aunt made for me or "I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence" by Amy Sedaris. Loads of great recipes, and it's a hilarious read as well.

About 70% are family. 15% are from Rachel Ray lately. 10% from recipe books and magazines.

50% cookbooks
25% Mom
15% online and magazines
10% Me

I keep telling myself the Me part should be higher, and maybe it is in the end, since I can never seem to follow a recipe completely lol.

I look to the internet for inspiration VERY often, but will tweak internet recipes according to what I have on hand. My favorite go-to cookbook is Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything", which I probably consult on 25% of the occasions that I need a recipe. Looking at food blogs and recipes probably accounts for 90% of my online activities.

I'd have to agree with many of the other commenters that it is more where I get my inspiration from than where the actual recupes come from. I often see recipes on blogs (a lot of which are already adaptations from cookbooks) and then adapt those for my own tastes, so a recipe might be a combo of my own idea/internet/cookbook. But if I had to guess:

40% magazines
35% blogs/other Web sites
10% me
10% cookbooks
5% friends and family

Books - 25%
Magazines- 8%
Websites - 20%
Family - 35%
Myself - 12%

10% My own creations
30% Family
50% Books (and rarely a cooking magazine)
5% TV
5% Websites

50% Websites/Blogs
25% Books/Magazines
20% Personal attempts
5% Friends

40% from blogs
2% from other online food sites
3% from magazines
30% from my repertoire of recipes (which include family dishes, stuff I've made up and really like, things from cookbooks, wherever. My standards.)
15% from cookbooks
10% made up on the fly, based on ingredients in the house. Some become keepers. Others? Don't.

10% Magazines (so why do I retain all these Saveur, Bon Appetite and Cooks Illustrated???? - Absolutely cannot throw them out that's why)
40% Cookbooks
50% Internet & blogs (mostly Epicurious)

40% out of my head
25% Internet
25% Cookbooks
10% Family and friends

40% webostes (blogs, epicurious.com)
40% books
10% myself
10% family/friends

Excellent question! Caused me to really think it thorugh but this is what I've come up with:

20% from family and friends (family recipes, delicious stuff I've had at other peoples houses)

25% from cookbooks

40% from online sites and from food network shows that I then go to the internet to get the recipe for

15% from my own head. I really wish that I was more creative in the kitchen, and I'm really working on it, but the virgo in me won'tl give up the "it has to be perfect" attitude. Slowly I am working on that though!

I get about 80% of my inspiration from online sources - Epicurious is my "go-to" site. But I only follow about 10% as written (usually baked goods). The other 20% is from food I've eaten out that I want to re-create. Either way, I usually just create as I go.

That is the reason I started a blog; I could never recreate a winning recipe because I made it on the fly. Now I have to slow down and pay attention to what I'm doing and then try to get it posted "pronto"!

Most of my new recipes come from cookbooks from the library - 70%; then out of my head - 15%; then newspapers/internet - 10%; then friends - 5%. Older recipes come from Mom and what I can glean from what I remember of her cooking and the big, weird, three-ring binder cookbook covered in wallpaper (which at one time matched that of our kitchen) that she assembled from her mother and grandmother's recipes, snippets from newspapers and magazines, and her friends.

About 40% from Family - my grandmother and my dad were both fabulous cooks - dad actually had a recipe column in the local TV guide back in the day - and another 35% I make up in my head, usually just by opening the cupboards and seeing what's in there, 15% from cookbooks, which I always end up tweaking, and 10% from friends.

80% mine, but supported by web n books. I get inspired by an ingredient or a concept, and I google that term and dig thru cookbooks to see where people have boldly gone before, then synthesize it in my own way. I am horrible about following a recipe, I generally drift away halfway thru, which is terrible for a professional baker. Don't mess with the foodscience!
80% me
15% foodblogs
3% restaurants
2% cookbooks (generally a desperate measure)

Now that I'm out of college and on my own, finding recipes has become a whole new aspect of my life. Here's my breakdown:

25% from mom and grandma
25% magazines
50% online - Recipe4Living.com!!

1) family
2) friends
3) cookbook

30% from magazines - mostly fine cooking as I got all the issues from the last 5 years at a church sale for 10 cents each and am still sifting through them - then less so from martha stewart, cooking light and food and Drink (beyond fab free glossy published by the LCBO here in Canada

30% from cookbooks

15% from the web - epicurious, chow and then others I stumble across via links

15% from foodnetwork - but then I usually go to their website to get exact measurements etc so maybe this should be web too......anyway mostly from jamie oliver, nigella, barefoot contessa and everyday italian

5% from food sections of daily papers

5% from family and friends

Hope this helps!

and I should mention in regards to above - unless it's complicated baking I generally just use all recipes as a guide and tweak as I go along.

Most of my recipes are inspired by what I read both online, in cookbooks and in magazines. Sometimes from friends and family.

30% Magazines
30% Cookbooks
30% Internet
10% Friends and Family

I'm curious to read what your method of madness is!

I tend to buy a cookbook and try about 5 of the recipes. (I like to have them, and look at the pretty food.)10%

I do try things from magazines a bit more. (Like Rachel Ray's or some of those mini ones you can get next to the cash register -- 10%

I like to watch food tv shows and occasionally will print off their recipes. 5%

I make the same thing over and over because I have a boring husband and kids who hassle me about new stuff. (Burgers, spaghetti, oven baked chicken...) 75%

When I bake I use recipes pretty much as written - at least for the first time. Almost anything else I use the idea of a recipe with what ingredients are on hand, what I feel like tasting and how much time I have. For guidelines I use recipes I have collected from family and friends (40%), cookbooks (have over 200) 30%, internet including blogs (20%). While I look and read magazines I rarely cook directly from them although I have a box load of recipes clipped from the past 30 years.

I would like to know how people store their recipes for retrieval. I have tried recipe cards, 3 ring binders, recipe software from companies that within 5 years closed business and now I can't access my recipes.

I am, er, domestically disinclined, and don't cook much/well. My recipe collection consists of about 85% recipes from family and friends, 5% each from magazines, cook books and websites. I'm talking about recipes I actually use. I have a collection of recipes cut out of magazines or printed from websites that I have never tried, and really ought to throw away.

80% websites, 15% cookbooks and 5% magazines. The mag always seems to be Fine Cooking, the cookbooks are random (minus the exception that they're all pretty much Italian or asian (Chinese). And cooking.com single-handedly taught me everything I know about cooking starting 8 years ago when I was a junior in college.

It also taught me how to unlearn things my parents "taught" me. No more overcooked shrimp or boiled eggs.

20% internet: I will google recipes to get a basic idea, and then just take it from there based on what I have/like/think sounds good. Very occasionally will I follow a recipe relatively closely, and never exactly.

5% cookbooks: I only have a couple (although someday I will have MANY), but I'll turn to them for some more basic things, such as pancakes or basic bread recipes.

5% family and friends: This basically consists of the chocolate chip cookie recipe, and the wheat germ chewies, both high production items.

70% mind and theory: I'll generally just throw things together, as I basically know how food operates and tastes. I was "famous" freshman year for having more than 3 spices, the student average (I had upwards of 20 that year). Today, I'll just look around my kitchen, or occasionnally buy foods for an idea that I'll just throw together. Even bread, I don't use recipes unless I want a specific kind, because I know how bread dough should feel, and am comfortable with just throwing stuff together. It's intuition and creativity.

And I, too, am quite curious about this whole salt-on-egg thing... myself, I just use paper towels...

I get 95% of what I cook from a fabulous magazine called Taste of Home. Real recipes sent in by real people and tested before they're published. Don't think I've ever made anything from that magazine that wasn't good, and the recipes use normal ingredients that you have in your pantry. My mom gifted me with a subscription about 5 years ago and I've been grateful ever since.
Remaining 5% from Mom and friends.

definite change over the last year or so - they became a lot more net-oriented

at the present time, I would say it goes like:

40% cookbooks
20% magazines (Fine Cooking takes 99.9% of those)
20% blogs
19% myself
1% other sources (family, friends)

like most of the others, I start with a recipe from a tv show or the net or that someone gave me, and usually I will make it to the letter the first time, then I start tweaking- due to lack of gourmet ingredients, general lack of an important ingredient, or a crazy moment of creativity. If I am looking for something specific, I will check out food network, then glance thru several variations, get the general idea, and go from there.

Let's see...
50% online, but usually just as a reference point
20% cookbooks (I check them out of the library like some people check out Harlequin Romances)
20% magazines
10% self and family recipes

I collect Junior League cookbooks, but it's so much easier to find things online that I've skewed that way in recent years.

So..
75% online (epicurious, foodnetwork)
15% cookbooks
5% cooking shows
5% friends/family

30% Food&Wine magazine
20% internet
40% cookbooks at home
10% Mom (she doesn't like to share)/friends and family (curiously, they aren't sharers either)

I'd use Food Network as a resource, but I don't have cable.

most of my stuff comes from things that I found online that sounded ok and then I turn it into something more to my tastes. 75%?

and everything else comes from my family which got theres from being passed down or clipped from here or there.

75% from foodnetwork.com (I usually tweak their recipes to make them more healthy for everyday cooking, but leave them as is for dinner parties, etc)

15% from friends/family

8% from Bon Appetit

2% from blogs

40% from blogs
40% from cookbooks
20% from a combination of grouprecipes.com, my mom, newspapers, BBC Food and the Food Network site

50% are from tv and then tweaked to what i want. 20% my family tweaked to what i want. 20% the internet tweaked to what i want and usually referenced from what i've seen on tv. 10% my own brain and tweaked. Alton Brown has the only recipes i don't tweak

35% Magazines
15% Internets (including folks' blogs)
40% Cookbooks (several of which could count as privately published/collected "family recipes"-- about 15%)
10% Concocted at random from whatever happens to be in the freezer/pantry/refrigerator.

I also pester my mom on a regular basis to give me baking advice. Dratted pie crusts & meringues. Gah!

I now modify 100% of the recipes based on experience or after reading several recipes and taking the best of each. For baking, 50% family, 20% books, 30% websites. For cooking, 20% family, 20% cookbooks and 60% websites. My teenage son is taking culinary arts and I am now using a lot of his recipes.

fun to see how many people tweak, or just start from a recipe and go on from there, which is my way of doing it. I work for a caterer, so I get ideas there.I also have many cookbooks, some very old, and I surf them for inspiration. never go online for recipes.I also love the good food mags... good in my case being saveur,bon appetit, food and wine. of course we all get ideas from friends, and something I've not seen mentioned, restaurants you've gone to.
keep us posted!!

Hmmm, this is tough since I never follow any recipe to the letter, well maybe except for puff pastry and a couple of favorites from before I learned to play, but a guesstimate:

20% Cookbooks
35% Internet
10% Magazines
10% Family
25% My own

First off -- any egg-to-floor accidents I use "barkuuming" (remember Sniglets? The dog does the messy work). Then I just wipe up the rest with Simple Green. Works every time.

As for recipes:

60%: my own creation (mostly based on ingredients on-hand)
30%: online (blogs and websites)
10%: cookbooks

50% Magazines (Real Simple, Cooking Light)
25% Family/Friends
15% Me
10% Internet

60% Family
30% Me/Husband
10% Cookbooks/Magazines

60% family recipes
20% magazines, newspaper
10% friends
10% internet

Love your site! It has made me a better restaurant customer... and tipper!