If you've collected tons recipes from magazines, the internet and other sources, I've got a great tip to help you with your recipe organization. Read below to find the one product you need to create order out of your recipe chaos.
Confession: I know I talk a lot about simplifying and decluttering and purging, but when it comes to recipes, I am a bit of a hoarder.
I tear recipes out of magazines, print them off of the internet, grab recipe flyers at grocery stores, and snap photos of recipes on the backs of cans and boxes. Plus, I have a pretty decent collection of cookbooks, recipes that friends have emailed to me, and some old fashioned recipe cards passed down from my mom and my grandmother.
Pinterest is a great resource for saving favorite recipes when you can find them online, but many of my tried and true recipes pre-date Pinterest by decades. No app or website will be able to replicate my grandma's favorite cookie recipe written in her perfect cursive on a yellowing index card.
I don't bother organizing the recipes I haven't yet made; I just shove them into a plain folder. But once I've made something and decided it's a definite keeper, then I need to make sure I store the recipe somwhere where I can easily find it again.
There are probably a ton of fancy apps for organizing recipes, but I'm not ready to part with my paper recipes — marked up with my notes about what I changed or added, and usually splattered with a little sauce. So, when I make a recipe that I love, it goes into The Book.
The Book is nothing more than an old school photo album — you know the kind with the sticky pages covered with plastic sheets? I simply cut out the recipes and stick them into the book, usually putting several on a page depending on the size. If you want to get fancy and categorize your recipes by appetizers, dinners, etc, you definitely can, but I've never bothered with that.
I just trim the recipe, and stick it in — simple as that!
I like that the book lays flat when I'm referring to a recipe while I'm cooking, and I also like that I can easily move my favorite recipes (the ones I make again and again) to the front of The Book so that I can access them quickly.
This is not fancy, but it's fun and useful having my own personalized "cookbook" of recipes I love. Hopefully my book(s) of recipes are something my girls will enjoy looking through when they're older, and starting recipe collections of their own.
