Organizing your recipes

One genetic trait I inherited from my mother was cutting out recipes to try from magazines, newspapers, etc. Okay, maybe it's not a genetic trait, but she passed it down from her mother too. I've had the same binder to collect recipes I've cut out for years, and finally had to get a new one, because the old one was broken.

This is how I organize my recipes:

I have one, basic, three ring binder that is full of recipes I want to try. Recipes I've cut out of magazines, or found on the internet, or that people have given me to try. (When my mom didn't have the energy to cook anymore, she started cutting out recipes to give me that she wanted to try but knew she wouldn't, or gave me recipes she thought I would like.)

(You can make a cuter cover than that, but I don't have the energy to do that when I printed this out...)

I use sheet protectors as my dividers, and a bonus to using those, is when you find a new recipe but don't feel like taking the time to add it to the binder, you can put it in the sheet protector on the back of the page of the divider. So, if I find a salad recipe I want to try, but there isn't a blank page to put it on, I tuck it in the sheet protector that holds the Salad divider page. Does that make sense?

I also use those sticky picture pages that have the peel back plastic cover. These are my favorite to use, and are the easiest. When I run out of these, I lightly glue the recipe to paper and slip it in a sheet protector.

Once I try a recipe, if it was bad, I throw it away, if it's good, it gets moved to my tried and true recipe binder, shown below. (which was given to me by my friend Becky to collect all of our yummy recipes)

The recipes in this binder are put in here a number of different ways. There are recipe pages, like large recipe cards. I also use the same sheet protectors and sticky picture pages as I do in the other binder, but in this binder I also use picture album pages to hold my recipe cards.

My husband looks at my Recipes To Try binder and asks, "Do you really think you're going to try all of these recipes?" Little does he know, that depending on the week, I could use up to three or four recipes out of that binder a week. This week it has only been two. But, the weeks not over...

I like having the recipes that I want to try organized and being able to flip through them like I would any cookbook. So, if you have recipes lying around, here's a simple way to keep them organized!

My friend got my tried and true binder from this Etsy store, though she doesn't have any binders in there right now; you can custom order them. See more samples of her work here.