Cheap Organizational Tools for Your Recipes

After cooking at home for a long time, you’re bound to start collecting recipes from many places. Perhaps your favorite oatmeal cookies recipe is in that cookbook your sister gave you for Christmas. Your favorite chicken noodle casserole recipe, though, came from the side of a bag of egg noodles. And, your lasagna recipe came from the internet. How can you keep track of all of these gems?

Organizing your recipes doesn’t have to be hard or expensive. You just need to get them all collected in one location so that you don’t have to hunt for them. I’ve been complaining about this problem to a few of my friends and these are suggestions I’ve gotten from them.

Index Cards – You can copy each of the recipes onto a standard-sized index card. Then, punch a whole through the corner of each card and put them on a metal ring. All of your recipes will be in one place, and they’ll fit into one of your kitchen drawers.

Spiral Notebook – If the idea of having to copy each of your recipes doesn’t sound so great to you, you’ll love this idea. You can purchase one of those spiral notebooks the kids use in school. Then, simply tape your recipes onto the pages of the notebook. If the recipe is on a label, you can tape the label. I would, however, suggest making photocopies of the pages from your cookbooks. (I hate the idea of ripping pages out of a book.) If you want to sort your recipes by type, you can even opt for one of those multi-subject note books.

Computer Files – Some people suggested saving your recipes to your computer. You can create as many file folders as you like to keep the different recipes organized. You can simply scan the recipes into a .jpg file or you can type the recipe into a Word document.

File Cabinet – Nothing is quite as simple as putting your recipes into actual folders and filing them away. A folder will even hold all of those little scraps of recipes that you’ve cut out of magazines or jotted down on note cards.