Recipe Organization Part 1

I love to cook and try new recipes so as you can imagine I have a lot of recipe books and individual recipes that I am wanting to try.  Today I want to talk about where and how I store all of those recipes that I am waiting to try plus how I store all of my tried and true recipes and my collection of too many recipe books.  Recipe books are a weakness of mine (lol). 

 

This is a picture of my cabinet - yes an entire cabinet and this is not even all of my recipe books, almost but not all.  I said I have a problem.  lol

 

 

This is my corner basket that sits on my counter with more recipe books.

 

What I first started storing my recipes in.

 

 

Ok, first up my recipe basket.  Many years ago my mother in law bought me this lovely basket for Christmas and I loved it (still do). 

 

 

I spent a great deal of time typing my recipes onto 4x6 index cards, laminating and organizing them in my basket.

 

 

This little basket works great and we still use it to some extent but the problem for me is that my recipes were outgrowing it and I needed another system to sort and store them all (will share about it tomorrow). 

 

If you like this idea, there are many variations you could use.  First of all you could use any type of basket to store your recipes in.  This little wire basket is one that I bought a couple years ago at our local Walmart in the canning section.  I wanted it for my sink to hold my dish soap and hand lotion but it's purpose originally was to hold recipe cards.  If you typed (or printed) your recipes onto note cards you could easily fix them together with one of these little key ring type clips by simply using a hole punch and punching a hole in the corner of each card.  You can buy these in various sizes. 

 

 

 

Storing Loose recipes that I am waiting to try.

 

I find recipes that I want to try all of the time in magazines, online or that a friend may give me.  If I find it in a magazine I tear out the page, online I print the page but do I immediately fix the recipe?  NO.  Sometimes I will fix it within a few days but sometimes not for quite a while so what do I do with all these loose recipes? 

 

 

Well if you will look in my first pic of my cabinet I have this tin box sitting on the top shelf. This is a tin that was a gift and held cookies in it many Christmas' ago. When all the cookies were gone I re-purposed it and now it holds all of those recipes that I am wanting to try. 

 

 

It keeps all of those loose pieces of paper neat and it stores away nicely in my cabinet.  I pull it out from time to time when I am wanting to try something new and go through the recipes I have saved.

 

I encourage you to find a shoe box, cookie tin or something that you can store these kind of recipes in.  It will keep paper clutter to a minimum and you will know right where to go when looking for a recipe.

 

Join me tomorrow as I tell you how I sort and store my recipes now.  We still use the basket some but I a few years back I changed it up.  

 

Click here to be taken to Part 2.