Setting Up A Recipe Book

Here’s an easy way to make your own cookbook from Studio 5!

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I can’t deny it.  I’m a sucker for new recipes, an absolute complete sucker.  I gather and collect recipes from a multitude of resources including magazines, the Internet, and family.

So how does one organize the wide array of recipes?  May I suggest a few of my favorite ideas?

1. Before you sort anything, you must de-clutter. You read right.  Go through the pile of recipes you have cut out, printed up, and written down.  If you find any recipe that you haven’t made in over a year, and don’t truly see yourself making in the near future, get rid of it. (Unless it’s great-grandma’s famous dessert recipe; don’t get rid of that beauty EVER!)    Look at the ingredients.  If you cannot honestly see yourself ever having that particular food item in your home with any regularity, don’t hold onto recipes that include that type of food.

2. Choose your container. Do you use a recipe box or are you more of a binder person?  Decide what you want to store all those fabulous recipes (both tried and true and untried) in, and then you can start working on a system.

3. Divide and conquer. Now’s the time to start separating and sorting your recipes.  This step can take awhile because you have to decide on the way you’d like to do it.  You can separate by meal type:  appetizer, entrée, dessert, etc.  This is probably one of the quickest ways you can do it, simply because you can put a lot of recipes into just a few categories.  If you want something a little more specific, you can categorize by food type:  breads, soups, salads, pastries, etc.  This is going to take a little longer to organize, but will likely be a quicker system to search through when finished.  A third way I’ve seen recipe binders/boxes organized is by main ingredient:  beans, poultry, seafood, beef, etc.  It doesn’t matter which type of categories you choose, as long as it works for you.

4. Lastly, you’ve got to try it out! You may find that your system isn’t the best one for your situation.  You may, like me, discover that you need more than one binder/box, and separate systems for each.  My “main” recipe binder is separated by food type, but my “food storage” recipe binder is categorized by main ingredient, so that I can regularly rotate my food storage and harvest items.

Whatever works best for you is good enough! Test your system regularly by actually using those recipes and making some fantastic homemade meals for the family.  I guarantee they’ll thank you for it!