Recipes, Cookbooks, and Organizers – Oh My!

Like so many other things in life, recipes – when left to their own devices – can often multiply and take over and cause havoc and chaos in the kitchen.

I had a request to talk about Recipe Organization and how to file and keep a collection of cookbooks and recipes on hand without cluttering up your kitchen.

Being a cookbook and recipe collector (all the way back to high school), I have seen cookbooks and recipe organizers come and go, and what might work for some, may not work for others.  This can often be a “Trial or Error” process and you should approach it with an open mind.

Cookbooks.

Oh, if you knew how many cookbooks I owned, well, I guess you could say that Jamie’s love for the iPhone is comparable to my love for Cookbooks.  I’ve been collecting them for 3 decades (ouch!) and have seen many come and go.  I have learned that they quickly multiply and take up valuable space – and when I realized how little I used some – it was time to clean house.  I now have a small collection of cookbooks that fall into two categories:  Practical and Sentimental.

• My Practical cookbooks are the ones I refer to often – rely on in a pinch – and provide me with good recipes when I need them.  These are kept on my kitchen shelf.
• My Sentimental cookbooks are gifts from special people or cookbooks that just give me warm fuzzies – whether or not I use them often.  These often contain collections of stories along with recipes, so they have more meaning for me.  These are kept on a bookshelf in our basement – where I can grab them anytime, but they don’t take up space in my tiny kitchen.

TIP: Don’t keep a cookbook if you don’t use it.  My sentimental cookbooks are like If you have found one or two recipes that your family loves but the rest of the cookbook doesn’t do much for you – copy those recipes and pass it along to someone else who might use it.  A neighbor, a church, Goodwill – or sell it in your yard sale (Or hey – maybe it’s a hot item on ebay!)

Recipes

Ah- my favorite part.  I have recipe cards which showcase my grandmother’s handwriting.  Recipes for things like Blood Sausage.  Ewwwww!  However, I don’t keep it for the recipe, I keep it for the sentiment attached to the recipe…  I also have recipes I use that were family favorites while I was growing up, or that are family favorites for my family now.

Side note: Actually, my mom and copied recipes my grandmother kept in her own recipe file and made gifts by putting one set of each into mini photo albums for all of the granddaughters.   This is special to me, even if I don’t use it often.  I have my grandmother’s infamous pie crust recipe, too – and that’s one I love!

One thing I will say is that if you have a lot of handwritten recipes, newspaper clippings, etc., that you refer to often, it would be a WISE investment to put these “family favorite” type recipes into a recipe keeper.

Another Side Note: My mother-in-law has a recipe “file.”  It’s bigger than a shoe box and it is literally hundreds of recipes all thrown into a box.  She knows some recipes by sight, but she has to weed through the box to get to it.  One of my goals this summer is to ORGANIZE her recipe box because it gives me shivers when I see it.  And I’m nosy and want to know what kind of treasure I’m going to discover in her collection!

• A recipe keeper can range anywhere from a 5×7 journal containing your favorite recipes (handwritten, glued or taped in), to a 3 ring binder with page protectors and dividers.

• There are Collected Recipe books – where you can record your favorite recipes – or just slide your 3×5 or 4×6 cards into protective sleeves like a scrapbook.
• There are recipe file boxes with pretty dividers and coordinating recipe cards.  Pretty photo boxes are a good use for this, too!  Especially for extensive collections.
• And don’t forget the online recipe sources – like Foodbuzz – for you techie cooks who love to store things online!

For my kitchen, I have a large 3 ring binder with page protectors.  It is so flexible, and I keep special recipes I’ve discovered in it – like the Sweet Potato Pie that makes my husband very happy – or the Sweet Sourdough Bread we can’t get enough of.

It was birthed about 10 years ago from a need to get rid of magazines that I’d been keeping just for one or two pages worth of recipes – and along with my prized recipes – it contains my “I Want To Try These Recipes” file, or my Recipe Queue as it were.  I can pop a page out with its protector to leave on the counter and it works really well for me.  If we find that a recipe leaves something to be desired, I can toss the recipe into my recycling and have room for more.

It has morphed and changed over the years, and is why it has worked for me.  From a single gal to a married mom, my tastes have changed – and rather than having a collection of 50+ seldom used magazines or cookbooks collecting dust, I’ve got 1 filing system that works.

Because of the variety of cookbook binders and coordinating page protectors, you can customize your system to fit YOUR needs.  You can shop at your local Hobby Lobby or even a local scrapbook store and find helpful ideas to get your recipes under control!

If you have questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer them or cover this in another post!

Here is a great looking recipe organizer – especially for a Family Recipe Collection – with lined pages, places to keep magazine or newspaper recipe clippings, and coordinating recipe cards to add – it’s a nice way to keep it all together!  It is ring bound and allows rooms for refills, too!