Are you struggling to find a way to efficiently keep your recipes organized? You most likely have cook books, random sheets of paper, index cards and magazines lying around with your prized recipes. But, when it comes time to actually cook something, you have to dig through all your books, papers and magazines to find the recipe you want. It doesn’t have to be that way!
Here are a three ways on how to organize recipes:
Use Index cards
You could take the time to copy all your recipes onto index cards. Or you could tape the ones from magazines onto the cards (then ditch the magazine to help tackle your paper clutter!). Organize them alphabetically or by category in a recipe box like the one pictured above above.
Use a Binder
Make use of a three ring binder and sheet protectors. Simply place recipes you’ve printed, cut out or received from friends and family into the sheet protectors. Organize them by category then once it’s time to cook or bake, remove the recipe from the binder to have beside you while you work! The sheet protectors also double as a “splash guard”.
Use your Computer
Type, download, or scan your recipes, then again, organize them by category into a bunch of files right on your hard drive. As I mentioned in the post about taming paper clutter, an online program such as Evernote, may help you to organize recipes as well. Or if you’re using Pinterest, pin all your favourite online recipes (or ones you’d like to try) for visual reference! The only problem with using your computer is, when you want to use a recipe, you have to set your computer on the counter (only if you have a laptop, of course) or print out the recipe.
Using a couple or all of these recipe organization ideas may work best for you. I currently have some recipes on index cards, in a three ring binder and on Pinterest. This is what’s working for me right now. Although, I’m going to take a look in stores to see if there are any photo albums or recipe binders that would work for me to put all my index card recipes into. I wouldn’t mind doing away with my recipe box!
What works for you when it comes to recipe organization? Do you have any tips to share?
I gathered mine in Google Docs, by scanning my cards, now are available on my phone, tablet or laptop no matter where I am. Also makes it easy to share recipes with family and friends.
This is such a great idea!
I started using colored index cards, then putting them in a photo album. I use the first two pages as a sort of menu with the recipes, then i have a spot where i put some helpful coupons. I actually keep the rest of the index cards in colored category in the rest of the photo album. if i start running out of spots, i can add more pages, or even stack index cards behind each other. Its been very convenient for me to just pull this out and (most) everything is in one place.
I use pinterest and then i use my keyboard/stand to prop up my ipad and read from there.
I use a photo album (2 actually). The plastic cover keeps things clean.
The Evernote Food app is my new preferred method of recipe organization – it pulls the recipes already in your Evernote account into the program directly, by recognizing which ones belong in the food app. This is a big improvement on what the app used to be, so make sure to download the latest update.