Recipes, recipes and more recipes!
I’ve officially dubbed this the summer of organization! Yea, I think I said that last year too but something happens to me during the school year and I get too busy to put things away properly and I end up with stacks and piles that I really despise. I know it’s a strong word, but I really do despise piles.
One of the first organizational tasks that I decided to tackle was all of the cooking magazines and cookbooks that we have. i love Clean Eating Magazine (even when it doesn’t look like it by the food that I eat sometimes…) so much so that I have every single magazine that they’ve published. Yes, it’s true! There are so many delicious recipes in there and I’m seriously needing a diet overhaul so I decided to combine all of them with the Everyday Food magazines that our friend Michela got us before we were married.
Step one: go through the cookbooks that we have and don’t use
Done! Not to worry, they are all going to wonderful homes. I’m giving the Rachael Ray cookbooks to Hilary and the Weight Watchers ones to my friend Andi.
Step two: pull out all of the recipes that sound good and put them into piles (darn piles!)
Step three: organize the piles into sub-categories and then stuff into page protectors
Step four: make binder spine labels, binder cover labels and sub-category labels so you know where everything is
Step five: marvel at your beautiful new recipe binders even though they take up more space than the magazines did 🙂
Step six: try to find space in the cabinet for them and relocate some other cookbooks in the process
I still need to work on the index for each binder but I had to step away from everything for a little while before I drove myself (and Carl!) crazy. All in all the project took about three days and even when I thought about giving up and just tossing everything in the trash I was very happy with the finished product.
Do you have a recipe or cookbook collection? How do you organize it?
From 5k to Marathon 
Even as a child you reorganized yourself with new, brightly colored folders, pens and other goodies. If you remember, it wasn’t building the new stuff that was a problem, it was the mounds of leftover papers that frustrated you. Some things never change Precious, do they? Love you bunches! Mom
I love the idea of making binders! If you find that you are at a loss for things to organize in the near future, I have PLENTY for you to work on! 😉
OH! I love Clean eating magazine!
Wow, that’s a really clever way of thnkinig about it!
This not only sounds wonderful but looks incrediable! Can NOT wait to try it.
I’m bookmarking this recipe! Thanks!
I have one binder for all my recipes and usually about every 6 months toss those “I want to make but haven’t yet” if they’re just too complicated, require weird ingredients (I had a recipe for dirty rice that I didn’t realize used some weird parts of pig and such) or I want to make more room for more recipes. I LOVE having those recipes in page protectors too, so handy and easy to have laying around the kitchen. I also use this binder for all my internet recipe finds.
Wow! That’s a lot of work! I’m very impressed, because I would have gone the way of recycling everything! I’m not much of a recipe keeper; I guess I figure that’s what the internet is for…but then again, you can’t have it in a page protector then. Interesting idea, hmmm….
I’ve been doing the same thing with all my recipes except i refuse to write the recipes out (i was given an awesome recipe book but it requires you to write/type them out on cards) until i’ve tried them. So now i have a stack of recipes that i need to try and it gets daunting. But i think now that my book is getting full i’ll switch to the page protector idea and even keep recipes i haven’t tried so i can get rid of the piles! Thanks for all the ideas everyone.
Oh lordy I hate piles. Try the page protectors that way you’ll be able to somewhat organize them until you can put them in the recipe book. Good luck!