What to Do with All Those Recipes

Everyone who likes to cook has one; a shoe box, file folder or drawer where they keep recipes they've torn out of magazines, printed off web sites or had passed along to them by family and friends. After years of collecting, I had accumulated three large, twelve- pocket file folders jammed full of recipes, which I rarely used because it was such a pain in the butt to find the recipe I wanted. It was time to do something.

I considered my options:

1. Buy software designed to store and organize recipes on my computer.
2. Get more twelve-pocket file folders and actually organizing the recipes
3. Make photocopies of the recipes and store them in notebooks.
4. Throw everything away and forget about it.

The software option would require me to type out all my recipes, a very daunting task considering I already spent about eight hours a day on the computer and my neck and shoulders would not stand for more.

Adding to and organizing my old file folder system was tempting, but it would be bulky and hard to store.

Making photocopies of all the recipes was almost as time consuming as typing them up, not to mention how many trees would have to die in the process.

Number 4 wasn't a viable option because I am emotionally incapable of throwing that big a chunk of my life away.

Not sure of what to do I tabled the idea until I decided that I needed to put together a family cookbook. ( see my article Writing a Family Cookbook ) That got me to sit down and actually go through all the recipes I had and organize them, which left me with the bulky, but now organized file folder system.

Then one day, I had an epiphany. Why not take a cue from my scrap booking friends and put together notebooks with the actual clipped, copied and handwritten recipes? I could slide them into clear sheet protectors, which would not only hold my recipe collages together, but also keep them clean when I used them I the kitchen. No typing, no dead trees and a chance to use my creativity...brilliant!

Here then, is the process I followed to achieve recipe organization Nirvana:

CULLING

Armed with a large trash bag, I went through all the recipes. They had to fall into one of three categories or they got tossed.

1. I will actually make this recipe.
2. It has sentimental value.
3. It's a classic.

Before I knew it I had several trash bags full of recipes that didn't fit these criteria; recipes that were too complicated, too dated, and all those I though sounded good after I had consumed a half bottle of wine while watching the Food Network.

ORGANIZING

Here's where my already organized file folders came in handy. All the recipes were divided into categories from cocktails to desserts. All I had to do was slide them into the sheet protectors and put them into notebooks that I had divided with corresponding indexes.

For some of the recipes, this was easy. Many were on full pages torn out of magazines or printed off the computer, but what to do with all those clippings and hand written recipe cards?

Using the full pages as background, I slid the clippings and recipe cards into places where they would fit in a collage like fashion. ( see photo accompanying article).

A note about newsprint: Newsprint deteriorates over time, as you may have noticed if you have squirreled away a lot of clippings from newspapers, so these recipes should be copied if you plan on keeping and using them for any period of time.

MAINTENANCE

Now that I have all my recipes in easy to store and use notebooks I find that I am actually using them more often. However, dedicated foodie that I am, I'm still collecting new recipes. In order to insure that things don't get out of hand again, whenever I add new recipes to the notebook, I go through the section I am adding to and get rid of anything that no longer sounds that appetizing, or I just haven't used.