Wednesday, February 16, 2011

{Organizing Recipes}

There are a million great ways to store recipes, so really you have to find what works best for you. I've seen super cute binders that I would have a blast putting together and decorating, but the bottom line is that I wouldn't want to ever get one speck of anything on it in the kitchen. Therein lies the problem!
So I continue to use my 4 x 6 Longaberger Recipe basket from a decade ago and it still works well for me. I was looking for a recipe yesterday and realized that it had been quite some time (as in YEARS) since I've gone through my recipe box and cleaned it out. When I couldn't get the lid back on, I knew it was time to do just that. I'm going to apologize in advance for dark pics...I'm playing with camera settings! Here's what works for me!
So here's my recipe box. It also has the matching lid. It can be anything of course, but I've had this probably 10 years and I like how it looks on my countertop and honestly, it just works for me!
I have each recipe printed out on blank 4x6 cards like this:

You know when you see a magazine pic of a cute treat? I just cut those out and adhere them to a 4x6 card as well...along with any note if necessary. Some like the following are really self-explanatory, but I need the pic for future reference!

Then I designated one 4x6 card to be my "divider" and I used self-stick Avery tiny file tabs. These are my categories:
Chicken     Breakfast     Desserts     Halloween     V-Day     Easter     Xmas
Kids & Misc     Beef/Pork     Seafood     Sides     Mexican     Dips,Snacks, & Drinks
My "Kids & Misc" tab has things like playdough recipes, homemade dog treats, and hummingbird food. That kind of thing.

It keeps me organized, I can find what I want really easily, and especially for holiday treats (all of them!) I find that I go right to my recipe box when holidays roll around. It's also easy when I find a cute treat idea in a magazine, I can clip it, stick it to a card, and file it right where it goes.
I'm sure there are plenty of cool methods for recipe storage, but this one works so well for me I wouldn't change it at this point.  What do you use?

I'm linking up over at:

3 comments:

  1. Nice job organizing. I just love that basket. Thanks so much for stopping by and joining my party. Hope to see you again next week.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I use that same Longaberger recipe basket...with the tie! :-)

    ReplyDelete

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