Organizing My Recipes

My Recipe Collection

Over the last year, I have been working on one major project.  Now when I say a year, I don't mean I've worked on it everyday, but something I have worked on at night when the kids go to bed or when I have a moment here and there to do something.  As you may have read in my previous post, A New Recipe ~ Blueberry Almond Buckle, I am a self taught cook.  I am always trying new recipes and actually taught myself some cooking skills by watching the Food Network and using Rachael Ray's 30-Minute Meal cookbooks.  But what I found was that I would try a new recipe, love it and then could never figure out which cookbook it was in.  Since I make a menu every Sunday night, along with a grocery list, this made it very time consuming to look through all my cookbooks and attempt to find the recipes we liked.  I needed a way to save myself some time.

As a result, I decided I would start typing in every recipe we tried and print them out.  Of course, it had been years of trying recipes, and no joke, over a hundred cookbooks, but I started searching for the recipes I knew we had tried and loved.  I used small post-its to mark each of the recipes I wanted to type in.  Once I had gone through every single cookbook, I started typing.  A year later, I think I have every single recipe I have tried typed up and organized into binders - I had so many I needed two binders!  I sorted them by type of recipe and then alphabetized them.  The best part is I used the plastic sleeves for each recipe, so I do not have to worry about ruining them when I cook.  They are easy to wipe off.  Some of the recipes, especially ones I found in magazines, I could just print from the website, such as from Hannaford, Kraft, and Food Network.  The great part about some of these is that they sometimes include photos of the recipes.  Maybe one day I'll add photos of my own to the recipes I typed, but for now I'll stick with just the recipes - that is a project for another day!

Now when I make my menu on Sunday nights, I can quickly search my binder and have them at my fingertips.  Besides, now when someone asks for one of my recipes, I can easily e-mail it or print it out since I have them all on my computer.  Even better, since I am caught up, when we try another new recipe, it is much easier to type up one at a time, than trying to sit and type 10 to 20 at a time!