Do you have a box or drawer of loose recipes? Ones you've cut out of magazines, newspapers, off of labels, or printed off of the Internet? I sure do.
I've been meaning to corral them in a organized way for forever. When the kitchen was demolished, they kind of just got all stacked up in a chair in the living room (until my husband got sick of looking at them and moved them to the guest room).
Last year while I was in Kentucky, Rachael (who is the sweet daughter of my friend Kathleen, and blogs about her adorable boys and their hilarious antics at Little Boys and So Much Noise) inspired me. She brought with her to her mother's house a binder of her favorite recipes.
So tonight I dug out a binder and some page protectors. I got on the computer and found some clip art I liked and a title for a cover and spine.
The page protectors are too wide to add tabbed dividers and have them be visible. Luckily I had some of these Post-It tabs in the desk drawer.
I put them across the top instead of the open edge since the protectors were so wide.
I already have quite a few of my loose recipes loaded into it, and will continue to work on it. I think I may need more than one binder before I'm done.
This is another thing I've had on the to-do list forever. Action! Progress! YES!
I got a recipe binder for Christmas and bought one for my daughter too - I have a recipe box but I like the binder because I often print recipes from the Internet or tear a page out of a magazine and it's nice to have the bigger option to store them.
ReplyDeleteI’m printing them out all the time…sometimes the same one over and over when I can’t find the original. Hope this helps with that.
ReplyDeleteI have been making little recipe books from those little photo books. When Jordan was Iraq I made the first one, put his picture on the cover and the recipes for cookies and stuff I sent him inside. He said some of them were really awful.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great Idea, I have quite few recipes on scraps of paper and I usually just tuck them into a recipe book but then if I don't use the book then I will never see it again!
ReplyDeleteI will be doing this for sure X Dawn
Peggy, I love the little recipe books from photo books, and have been wanting to make a couple. What a great idea to make one for the things you made and sent to Jordan! Love that. Even the memory that some of them were ‘awful’ reminds him that you were sending him love when he needed it.
ReplyDeleteI did make a small booklet for my kids of our family’s traditional Thanksgiving dinner with recipes from great-grandmother on down, and included everything from how to thaw the turkey to how to know when the pumpkin pie is done.
This binder I’m currently assembling is completely utilitarian. Nothing fancy, just so that I can find everything in one place. I was thinking I would need more than one to fit everything, and my friend mentioned that she wants to do one by seasons. I think that is genius, because I definitely use different recipes in Spring/Summer than I do in Fall/Winter, so I think I will split them up like that eventually.
Dawn, glad you like the idea and glad to know I'm not the only one that tucks them away in out of the way places. :)
ReplyDeleteI've been working on this too...very S-L-O-W-L-Y! I've so many loose recipes piled on my cookbook shelves, etc. that I can never find the ones I want when I need them.
ReplyDeleteI finally to decided to put them into binders and get them organized. I'm making slow progress, but at least it's progress.
I decided to make one binder for tried and true recipes (ones I've already tried and liked...the ones I'll want to make again), and another one for recipes I've found that I want to try, but haven't gotten around to yet. Once I try them, I either ditch the recipe (if it didn't work out so well) or move it to the other binder. :-)
I even got a small 1/2" binder before Christmas, and pulled the recipes I wanted to make for the holiday season and put them all in there where I could find them easily (candies, cookies, holiday meal favorites, and a few new things to try). After the holidays, I moved them back into the appropriate places. Worked really well.
(Love the sheet protectors too...keeps the recipes in good shape while I'm cooking...especially when I have kiddos helping.)
Right now I have one "Tried & True" binder and 2 of the "To Be Tried" ones...sooooo many recipes...so little time...
..AND...I was excited to finally find some divider pages that worked with the sheet protectors. Oh the little things that excite me...LOL!
ReplyDeleteGood for you! I have a shallow box that holds all the recipes I pull out of magazines or print out and keep saying I have to pull them out and try them to see if I want to keep them.....hoping that will one day be started. I did go through dozens of cooking magazines and culled just what I wanted so that freed up a ton of space.
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