If you have one of our 12 Months of Organizing calendars, you know that this month the tip is for recipe organization. Given that my kitchen is under construction and my house is in a state of chaos, I decided to gain control over one small area that had been bothering me: my recipes.
Favorite recipes used to be easily contained in the small accordion file my mom gave me for my wedding engagement, but the file was bursting at the seams. I also started to wedge recipes I had printed or pulled from magazines between the cookbooks on my shelf. It was turning into a jumble of papers. And then I had an old-fashioned recipe card file that was stuffed too.
I emptied the accordion file and the recipe card box, and pulled out all the loose recipes. Now what to do? Sort! I spread the recipes all over the floor and started to group them into categories.
Next, I purged recipes that I had in duplicate or that I knew I’d never make. I also found a ton of delicious recipes I had completely forgotten about.
Now for the fun part: I put all the recipes to keep in a binder! Actually, two binders. I had this solution in mind and was ready with tabs and hundreds of plastic sleeves. The plastic sleeves work for small recipe cards and full size printed pages.
The result? Recipes are sorted by categories, and all easily visible in the sleeves. I can also pull out the sleeves for cooking and the recipes won’t get dirty or damp.
Can’t wait to cook again!