The next time we buy a house, I’m going to pay a LOT more attention to the kitchen. As it stands in our townhome, I have a very small kitchen and NO PANTRY. Boo hoo, right?!
As a result, I have to be very creative with my cupboard space. Mostly it’s just a hideous mess because I have waay too many kitchen toys, but how could I part with any of them? Alas, I cannot.
I digress.
One of the overflowing areas of my life and kitchen is my recipe collection. Holy cow because I love collecting recipes, I just didn’t manage them very well.
So I put something together recently and I think it’s pretty fabulous.
First, these are the best dividers ever. Forget the cheap paper kind, these are lots more expensive, but totally worth it ($2.88 for 5 at Walmart). They’re plastic with pockets on the front and back, which is perfect for everything but especially for a recipe book because I can “temporarily” file my new recipes in the pockets until I get around to putting them in the sheet protectors.
The hardest part to organizing recipes is figuring out the categories, right?
I combined the categories from my two favorite cookbooks, The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook and The America’s Test Kitchen Baking Book and here’s what I came up with:
- Dressings & Sauces
- Appetizers
- Salads & Sandwiches
- Soups & Stews
- Vegetables
- Rice, Grains, & Beans
- Pasta
- Eggs & Breakfast
- Meat
- Slow Cooker/Pressure Cooker
- Bread & Pizza
- Quick Breads & Muffins
- Cookies
- Brownies & Bars
- Cake
- Pie
- Fruit Desserts
- Drinks
- Preserving
- Freezer Meals
- Food Storage
- Kids in the Kitchen
That pretty much covers it. That’s a ton of categories and lots of dividers, but I can find everything easily with these categories and this previously monstrous collection is now organized and useful. I love it.
I use a 2″ white notebook and put each recipe in a sheet protector to keep it clean from spills and messes and most importantly, this is a system I can keep up with.
And there you have it. Nothing fancy or designerish, but it’s one little corner of my kitchen that is less chaotic and my brain feels a little less cloudy too…
How do you organize your recipe collection?
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