Recipe Organization

I love food and I love organizing, so you’d think that my recipe collection would be highly organized. Think again. My recipes are a mess. Think one small set of cookbooks + one bajillion food magazines + hundreds of random pieces of paper stuffed into a file folder organizer. Never mind. Don’t think about it. It’s bound to make you nauseous.

As I finished up our command center, I was reminded of the cupboards and shelves surrounding it (and the mess contained in them). My cookbooks currently sit on the shelves and the food magazines and random pieces of paper are stuffed into one of the cupboards. This has always been an area that I’ve wanted to organize; it’s just always felt too overwhelming for me to get motivated. 

I have had a difficult time deciding what organization system to use for my recipes. I’ve looked at online databases, cute recipe cards and recipe boxes, binder systems, etc., and while I’ve liked parts of each, I could never settle on one. When I decided it was finally time to tackle this project, I was leaning towards something colorful and cute. But the more I got into it, the more basic, simple, and streamlined approach won out.

I felt an urgency to get my recipes in order, but my budget wasn’t really sensing that same feeling. I decided to get things organized as cheaply as possible and ended up doing it essentially free.

Here is what I started with:

I rarely ever look through the recipe magazines for new ideas so I set the magazines aside for now. I sorted through all my random slips of paper first. I recycled anything that wasn’t titled (and I couldn’t figure out what the recipe was for), anything I made once and didn’t like, and anything I had once intended to make but now didn’t see that happening. 

Next, I divided up the remaining recipes into categories. I menu-plan each week based on what is on sale. So, for example, if beef is really cheap one week, I put together more beef recipes than chicken to save some cash. My final categories were: beef, breakfast, chicken, desserts, fish/seafood, miscellaneous, pasta, pork, sausage/ham, and turkey.

I thought about buying a large amount of page protectors and just taping or gluing the little pieces of paper onto an 8 ½ x 11 sheet and inserting them that way. But the obsessive organizing part of me wasn’t okay with that solution. I created a template in Microsoft Excel that allowed four recipes to be printed on each page. I actually re-typed each recipe into the template. Now before you roll your eyes at how ridiculous that sounds let me tell you that it literally only took me one hour a day for five days. That’s not really all that bad figuring I ended up with a very streamlined and organized recipe binder in the end. Or so I tell myself…

I re-purposed some old file folders by cutting them in half and adding labels to the tabs. These became my category dividers. Then I just printed out each category, three-hole punched the paper, and stuck it in the binder.

I still might invest in some page protectors for each of the printed pages just to protect them from spills and such. I figure now that all the random slips of paper are taken care of, I can go through the magazines and just rip out pages that I’d like to keep. I can three-hole punch the actual magazine pages and insert them in the binder by category. I don’t see a purpose in keeping all the magazines because there is only about one or two recipes in each that I use. 

I saved any handwritten recipe cards from my grandmothers. I’d like to preserve those someday, somehow. All of the other pieces of paper got recycled though. 

Re-typing these recipes helped me remember all of the yummy meals that I have made in the past and got me really motivated and excited to get back to making them again. They also made me really hungry –so word to the wise – don’t work on a project like this when your tummy is rumbling. 

In the end, I opened up an entire cupboard above the command center. I’m considering moving my stash of cookbooks into the kitchen and reorganizing the bookshelves with other items. We’ll see what happens. I’m sure this recipe binder will be updated at some point in the future, maybe even to something cute and colorful. But for now, it solves the problem I was struggling with and will help my recipe collection to stay organized.

This project was shared in a link party over at: