I’m not afraid to admit that my recipe collection was a disaster. There were some handwritten small cards that used to belong in a recipe box. There were some on magazine pages, torn out from God knows when. There were well-used and greasy printed recipes and a half-organized binder.
Each time I was looking for a recipe, I had to search through papers and pages, only to be distracted by another recipe I had been looking for a few months back and couldn’t find. It was time to get serious. Since I’m always looking for a good way to streamline my day and organize things to save time, I decided to tackle the dreaded recipe collection. It was in need of some serious TLC!
Supplies
Step 1: Gather and Sort
I took all of my recipes and put them into one pile. I sifted through each one and decided which I would keep and toss. I realized I had recipes from years ago that I still hadn’t tried and probably would never try. Why bother keeping them?
Next, instead of dividing them by “genre,” like cookies, poultry, or crockpot, I sorted them by month. For example, why would I cook a citrus shrimp kabob in January when my patio would be covered with snow? My famous apple pie is always made in November, and I always get a hankering for pumpkin bread in October. It seemed natural to sort each recipe based on the time of year I’m usually interested in cooking it.
Step 2: Divide and Conquer
Once I divided my recipes, I realized there were some months with fewer recipes and others where I felt the recipes could be combined. For example, I have a ton of cookie recipes for December, but many recipes I cook in July could also be cooked in August. You may want to combine a few months as I did, depending on your baking and cooking style. If you prefer a more uniform binder, go right ahead and make 12 dividers!
Step 3: Keep it Clean (and neat)
All magazine recipes were placed into a sheet protector and right into the binder. Other recipes that looked worn out were reprinted and fit to one page. It’s much easier to follow a recipe that doesn’t go onto another page. For the recipe cards, I retyped them and added them to my printed recipe pile, put them each in a sheet protector, and placed them into the binder.
Step 4: Digital Purge
Whenever I see a new recipe in my virtual mailbox, I always put it into a folder and somehow forget about it. I went through my whole email box, reviewed each recipe, printed or tossed it, and then deleted the email. I copied and pasted each recipe into a Word document and sorted it into monthly folders on my computer. If the recipe binder goes up in smoke, I still have an electronic copy.
Step 5: Use It, Don’t Lose It
The binder is now in one of my kitchen cabinets, and I hang the recipes I’m using for the week with a magnet on the side of my refrigerator. At the end of the month, I return all my “used” recipes to the corresponding section in the binder. If the recipe didn’t turn out as I had hoped, I toss it and move on!
My husband hasn’t realized that he’s been eating chicken in 60 different ways for the past two months, so it allows me to feel like we don’t always have the “same old” stuff. The other wonderful thing about this is that I now focus my search on ingredients that are in season or readily available to save money and time at the grocery store.
Ready to try it out? Although it seems complex, I did most of this while watching Netflix. Wait until the kiddies are in bed so you can give it your full attention.
