A recipe box stuffed with random, handwritten pieces of paper and online printouts alongside stacks of outdated, mix-matched cookbooks is not fully conducive to creative, productive time spent in the kitchen. Every family has their favorite recipes that are handed down from generation to generation and those popular dishes that are craved each holiday. To ensure your special collection stays intact and easy to retrieve, give your recipes a makeover of their own before the next holiday season starts to cook.
Add some order to your storage system. I recommend moving away from recipe cards and getting your go-to recipes in 3-ring white notebooks with clear view covers and spines for inserting labeled sheets. This helps eliminate the free-floating factor that can cause cards to be lost or quickly disorganized. Type out the card contents on full sheets of paper and include picture references when possible. You can use one larger 3 inch notebook and use dividers to separate and label your categories. Or for larger collections, use 1 inch or 1 ½ inch notebooks for individual categories. Consider using the labels “Appetizers,” “Soups & Salads,” “Vegetables & Side Dishes,” “Main Dishes,” “Meats,” “Breads,” “Desserts,” “Cookies & Candy,” or any detailed categories that would suite your set of recipes, like “No-Bake Desserts,” “Pies,” or “Beverages.”
Another important step in organizing a recipe collection is pairing down. Have you found recipes, tried them out, and then decided they didn’t make the cut for your family’s tastes? Throw those away. Organized and stored recipes should be made up of the ones you intend to use repeatedly. Use a plastic document case or an expanding file folder to pull together internet recipes or recipes torn out of magazines or off of product packaging. Only add them uniformly to your main collection if you have tried them and decided they are worth making again. A similar principle applies to cookbooks. They can stack up over the years and may just be taking up shelving space if you only really use a few recipes continually out of a book. Make photocopies of those applicable pages and add them to your notebooks. Then donate the cookbook or pass it on a relative or friend. They may find all new kitchen treasures inside.
Tackle your boxes or piles of recipes and turn them into a well-oiled kitchen machine right at your fingertips that can produce tasty dishes again and again. Do it with style if you use decorative scrapbooking paper, contact paper, or even leftover wallpaper in your finished product, and you have added a little flamboyance to your flambé.
DesignInMind column; appeared in the Valley Morning Star August 21st.
