I have many good recipes photocopied out of my cookbooks, cut out of magazines, and jotted down from a friends, all in page protectors in a binder right now with no real organization or divisions to them. There are many more great recipes I’ve found that I would like to add, but it seems so disorganized already. I have to shuffle through every time I want to find one, and it’s very not uniform looking. I’m a little OCD btw. 😉 Sooo… old school recipe cards and box? type out recipes into a formatted page and print them out? something else? I don’t want to need the computer open to use them, and I like having them all in one place. The magazine cut outs often have several different categories of recipes on the same page so I will have to recopy those if I want to separate everything into categories.
I know this is old school, too, but my Mom has individual pocket folders labelled, “desserts”, “appetizers”, “main dishes”, etc…Her recipes get clipped and stuffed into those, then those are kept in a binder. She claims it works like a charm, and she doesn’t have to re-type anything – just find the appropriate folder in her binder.
I get photo albulms from Walmart – ones that look pretty, and I write down the recipes on index cards, and put them in the photo sleeve. I get the albulms that have 2 photo sleeves per page, so on the top of one page I have the index card tell the name of the recipe and the ingredients and the second index card I write the steps to the recipe. If the recipe is very long, I’ll make sure it falls on the left side of the page so that the whole recipe can fit on both the left and the right side. (Does that make sense??)
You can either split the photo book into sections, or have one book for appitizers and sides, one for main meals etc. Then your recipes are all together, and they look pretty sitting on the shelf.
I typed it up on the computer, saved it and printed it. I organize them using the menu planning files (pretty binder covers, dividers, pages, etc.) from here and add to them as I need to. Once I got the bulk of it in the computer, aintainence is not that big of a deal, esp. if I am cutting and pasting a recipe. 😉
I just keep only 2 recipe books which I barely use anymore. I have memorised all the recipes I need to use. I have a simple schedule for meals and leave out all the rest. I rather have my children snack on natural raw vegies, or carrots, salads and eat fresh fruit with live probiotic yogurt than have sweet deserts.
I use a binder and organize by topic – it’s not super neat, but I’m generally able to find what I need pretty quickly. Just one recipe per page and remove any that you don’t love. If you have a lot, you could use several binders, but I wouldn’t relish recopying all mine onto note cards or retyping on the computer and I really like the full page format because it’s so easy to just print new finds off the computer and add them to the binder.
I have a 3 ring binder (actually 3 of them now). I have them in sections: breads & muffins, breakfast, dessert, other, meat-less, beef/turkey, chicken, snacks, veggies. I go through them now and then and will get rid of some or move them to the front. I have been (be it very slow) typing some that look like we had thrown them away and putting in sheet protectors as they always get spils on them.
I stuff them in whatever pockets, nooks and crannies I can; put them on the fridge with magnets thereby guaranteeing that I can never find what I need; tear them out of magazines and use them for bookmarks and then give away the books forgetting about the recipes. I collect so many recipes and I never use any of them. I’ve always seen recipes more as idea-sparkers than cut-and-dried directions, so I tweak everything or just get the general idea and then make it up when needed.
Even though some of the ideas above are just brilliant and sound easy to implement and maintain, I felt the need to speak up for the organizationally-challenged among us! 🙂