Organize Recipes

If you’re cooking with and for children you will need to know where your recipes are and how to find what you need – thus the need to organize recipes.

I’ve used many systems over the years, but the best system I have found is a 3 ring binder with notebook paper and some sheet protectors. The sheet protectors are for us messy cooks that spill and splatter things on their recipes.

Why would you want to use a 3 ring binder? It’s easy to find, easy to categorize your recipes and easy to see your recipes. You just open to the page and don’t have to worry about refiling your recipe back into your recipe box.

If you have lots of recipes I suggest you start with a 1″ binder where you only put the recipes that you use most often to make dinner. Take your family favorites and put them into piles of “chicken”, “beef”, “fish”, “pork”, etc. Your other recipes can stay in your card file or a box until you have time to get to them.

If you use a card file system, it’s pretty easy to convert over to this system. If you have recipes on cards just tape 3 to each side of a piece of paper and insert that in your 3 ring binder. If you have recipes already written on notebook paper or printer paper, then all you have to do is insert that into your binder.

You can even make a seperate binder for dessert recipes including mainly your family favorites. Those are the ones you use most often anyways.

Encourage your children to write down their favorite recipes, or even better yet, encourage them to write down the recipes to their own concoctions. They can have their own recipe book. Maybe they can help you organize recipes and then you can make a special recipe meal or dessert from that group.

The binder doesn’t have to be fancy, just functional. This system helped me finally organize my recipes to where I could the recipes that I needed. This also makes menu planning pretty easy too.