Recipe Organization

Recipe Organization:

Is your collection of recipes A Recipe for Disaster? Here’s an idea to organize your scattered Recipes:

Gather all you recipes of all sizes into one area. Beginning with Recipe books, decide which ones were used or even written in the past decade. Toss all the recipe books that you aren’t using on a regular basis. The internet is a great substitute for those old recipe books collecting dust.

Next, go through any handwritten card recipes. Keep all the tried and true in one pile and the “not tried yet” pile.

Do the same with the recipes printed off your computer and those that have been cut out of magazines.

Now your recipe collection should entail a few great books being used on a regular bases and two piles of recipes: “Tried and True” and “Not Tried Yet”.

Next decide which categories you want to use for your Recipe Organization. If you aren’t big on appetizers, no need for an appetizer section. If you are a Canner, make sure you have a canning category. Come up with your list of categories by looking at recipe books or, my favorite, the internet. Come up with your top 7-8 recipe categories. You can combine similar foods such as Breads & Pasta instead of making each separate. This will be the only part you really use your brain and the beauty of it is that you will in turn have a recipe collection unique to you and your cooking needs.

Now go and buy a Binder for each category. Try the 98 cent Black Walmart Binders if your budget is tight. No need to splurge. Now all you need are a couple packages of sheet protectors and you are set. Right next to the binders at Walmart, let’s not make this too hard.

Place about ten sheet protectors in each binder (depending on how large your recipe collection is). Now label each binder by printing off “Appetizers”, etc. on a sheet of paper and gluing or mod podging it to the front. Or label using Address Label Stickers. Vinyl Lettering can also be used. Be as simple or complicated as you want, but make sure you do it.

Now the best part—time to organize! Begin with your Tried and True pile. This is getting fun, right? If your recipe is a full sheet of paper, just throw it in the designated binder’s sheet protector. If your recipe is written on a card or a piece out of a magazine, glue several onto one sheet of paper and then place it in a sheet protector.

After the Tried and Trues are out of the way, you simply take the “Not Tried Yets” and place them in the front pocket of the designated binder they belong in. Once they are used, they either become a “Tried and True” and graduate to a sheet protector, or they get tossed in the garbage. By being in the front pocket, we don’t forget about these little guys.

And there you have it, a hassle free Recipe Collection worth cooking! Who’s hungry?