Organising Your Recipes
October 17, 2007
I love reading cooking and baking blogs and imagining eating all the delicious, mouth-watering food. Anybody else?
Well, if you have good intentions as I do, those recipes and recipe books pile up very quickly and start to overwhelm you.
So I thought I’d share what works for me.
1. I only buy cookbooks that feature my specialties.
I don’t cook meat dishes very well; I don’t know why, I just don’t. I also don’t do cakes – that’s a personal preference because I’m too lazy impatient for mixing this, and mixing that.
I love cooking stir-fries, pasta dishes and muffins, though, so that’s where I focus my energies.
2. I learned to let go of my good intentions.
I am now coming to terms with reality and realize that I am never going to make a triple-layer chocolate cake even for my husband’s birthday. I also deleted all the free recipe books from my hard drive that I now know I’m never going to use, like 101 recipes using coffee.
3. I have a Word document called Blog recipes to try.
When I’m browsing blogs and see a recipe that is (a) easy, (b) looks yummy and (c) that I am likely to try, I copy and paste it into this document. Then when I’m doing my menu planning or I feel like trying out new recipes on the weekend, I quickly print it.
This cuts down on the paper clutter!!!
4. I have a limited space in my kitchen for non-kitchen stuff.
Between the cupboard and my microwave (see picture), that’s all the space I allow for recipe books, appliance manuals and my Household Organising File with blank menu plans, shopping lists, travel lists and so on..[LG]Did you know we carry Cookware?[/LG]
The basket is also easy to carry to the TV when I need to go through it every couple of months.
How do you keep on top of the recipe & recipe book clutter?
I have compliled a “favorites” recipe notebook binder so I don’t have to look through a zillion recipes looking for my “White Sauce Butter Balls – which are frozen & great for potato soup and corn chowder) for instance. I have a photocopier so I can copy recipes from my cookbook collection to put into the notebook. Often there is only a few recipes that I want to keep and no others that I want to try so I can sell that cookbook on Half.com. This earns a little money & helps clear out my bookshelf. We hope to move in the spring to a much smaller place so this is a critial project to my downsizing project for the kitchen.
That’s a great idea, Sonnie!
I have so many cookbooks and I’m sure I only use a dozen recipes from each, if that. My mom gave me a cute little “heirloom” cookbook a while back. I’ll have to consolidate all my regular recipes into that. Plus, it’s a great way to pass on all the old family favorites to my kids someday. 🙂
~Eva
Thanks for commenting, Sonnie and Eva.
Those are some great ideas 🙂
My saving grace when it comes to recipes is a free program called Evernote.
Most of my recipes come from the internet (websites, blogs, etc.) Whenever I find something that is intriguing to me, I copy it to my program. Evernote lets me tag recipes with as many tags as I’d like, so I can categorize things in MANY ways. (For example I have categories like “main dishes” “chicken” “soups/stews” “beef” “crock-pot” – as you can guess, these categories frequently overlap, and I love being able to find things in any category. I can also tag things as “favorites” or “recipes I’ve tried” or even “served to the Johnsons” so I don’t serve the same meal to guests.)
When I plan my menu for the week I sit down with my program, choose the recipes I want for the week, then print them out on 4×6 cards. Then I keep used cards in a recipe card box. The beauty is, I don’t even sort the recipe box because I’ve got a tag in Evernote telling me if some thing’s been printed already. If it has, I can simply flip quickly through my stack of cards to find the recipe.
This system has worked BEAUTIFULLY for me! 🙂
Hi Laura,
I just checked out Evernote’s website and their free download. It looks great – I can’t wait to try it!
Thanks
~ Eva