For once, a non-computing-related idea.
We tend to cook recipes from our repertoire of twenty-or-so things that we know work well: bolognese, arrabiata, a few varieties of chilli and curry, Singapore noodles, and so on. Most of these recipes are fairly simple to remember except for the herbs and spices used. I've got around this problem for one particularly complex recipe by writing the spices and quantities on a sticky note and sticking it to the back of the spice cupboard.
It occurred to me earlier that it'd be perfectly reasonable to do this for all our common recipes: produce an A3 or A4 poster containing condensed recipes for all the things we normally cook, so that we could stick it to the wall above the worksurface and avoid having to run back and forth to recipe books or web browsers while we're cooking. Of course, this wouldn't just be useful for us: you could produce a "student recipes" poster with lots of simple recipes on for the self-catering accommodation on campus, or automatically generate a recipe poster from a user's favourite recipes on a web site. Another approach would be to publish a recipe book in calendar format with several recipes on each page, so you could hang it on the wall and turn to the right page before starting to cook.