Welcome to Day 9! Today’s challenge is one I’ve been wanting to do for probably 2 years and have never taken the time to do it. I hope you are excited about this! Today’s organizing and decluttering challenge is to organize and declutter your recipes! I realize that for some of you this could possibly take hours. This is especially so if you want it to be beautiful like a scrapbook or if you have many, many recipes! Ideally, I’d like mine to be pretty but I don’t want to spend so much time on it that I don’t finish. Most likely, it won’t be Pinterest worthy, but it will work for me! I’d like you to spend at least an hour on this project. My goal is to get done in an hour. Think it’s possible? I hope so!
Supplies Needed:
- Binder/Recipe Book OR file folders
- Recipes
- Writing utensils of your choice: pen/pencil/marker
- Post-It Flags or Dividers for your categories
- Paper Punch
- Scissors/Paper Cutter
- Adhesive: tape/glue stick/adhesive stickers
- Sheet Protectors (optional but highly recommend)
After you have your supplies ready, gather your recipes and decide the categories you will be using for your recipe book. To help you out here are the categories I am planning on using based on how I categorize my master list of recipes here (I may add more or delete as I go, but this is my plan):
- Appetizers
- Beverages
- Breakfast
- Breads
- Canning & Preserving
- Crock Pot Recipes
- Desserts
- Main Dishes: Beef Recipes
- Main Dishes: Casseroles
- Main Dishes: Chicken Recipes
- Main Dishes: Fish
- Main Dishes: Pork Recipes
- Main Dishes: Turkey Recipes
- Main Dishes: Vegetarian
- Side Dishes
- Soups & Stews
- Kids- (Homemade Playdoh, Homemade Puffy Paint)
- Miscellaneous- (Body Scrubs, etc)
- Recipes I Want To Try
- Meal Planning (Not recipes, just my meal plans)
Organizing Tips For Using A Binder/Recipe Book:
- Organize your recipes by category. For those of you who are super organized, if you want an index or table of contents that’s awesome. Save that until you are at the end of this project!
- Throw out recipes that your family didn’t like or were just ok. No one wants to eat food that is just ok. Keep the best, throw out the rest! It will simplify your recipe book and take less time!
- Do one recipe at a time. You won’t get confused if you cut it out to fit it on a page (which I totally recommend) on which recipe the extra few lines belong to.
- Grab your sheet protectors and start putting in the recipes you are keeping. If you aren’t using sheet protectors, this is when you will need to punch holes in the paper. The kids and I have a tendency of spilling things on the recipe we’re working on so sheet protectors are essential at my home.
- After you have them sorted by category, you can decide if you want them alphabetized, by how often you make a recipe, or randomly put into the proper category. There’s no wrong or right way to do this so do what works for you. If you don’t care, go for random. It’s faster!
- If you have the small recipe cards, what I’m doing is adhering them to a regular piece of paper. If there is a front & back to the card, I’ll be making a copy on my printer. You could also paper punch the card and stick it in or put one in a sheet protector and keep moving. Once again, this is your book, do what works for you!
- For recipes that are in actual cookbooks, I will be making copies of those recipes to put in my binder as I come across them. My goal is to eventually get rid of almost all of my cookbooks (I have a few special ones that my Grandma and Aunt have given me) and use my binder. Most recipes I use now either come from friends and family or off the internet and can be placed into the binder.
Organizing Tips For Using File Folders (Many are duplicated from up above so I’m sorry if you’re reading it twice!):
- Organize your recipes by category.
- Throw out recipes that your family didn’t like or were just ok. No one wants to eat food that is just ok. Keep the best, throw out the rest! It will simplify your recipe book and take less time!
- Do one recipe at a time. You won’t get confused if you cut it out to fit it on a page (which I totally recommend) on which recipe the extra few lines belong to.
- Grab your sheet protectors and start putting in the recipes you are keeping.
- After you have them sorted by category, you can decide if you want them alphabetized, by how often you make a recipe, or randomly put into the proper category. There’s no wrong or right way to do this so do what works for you. If you don’t care, go for random. It’s faster!
- If you have the small recipe cards, what I’m doing is adhering them to a regular piece of paper. If there is a front & back to the card, I’ll be making a copy on my printer. You could also just put them in the file folder. Once again, this is your book, do what works for you!
- For recipes that are in actual cookbooks, I will be making copies of those recipes to put in my binder as I come across them. My goal is to eventually get rid of almost all of my cookbooks (I have a few special ones that my Grandma and Aunt have given me) and use my binder. Most recipes I use now either come from friends and family or off the internet and can be placed into the binder.
Are you ready for this? I can’t wait to find out how many of you try this challenge! I think it will be one that can really make a difference in your organizing and decluttering efforts (and I’d love to know how long it takes you to finish)! If you have questions, please ask away either here in the comments or on the Facebook page! I hope you will post pictures on Facebook page too, it’d be encouraging to others!
In case you have missed any days in this series, here they are! (Don’t worry you can jump in right where we are in the series and go back later if you want to catch up or just finish out what we’re working on with us! I’m so happy that you are joining us in organizing and decluttering your home!)
Day 8 Update: Day 8: Day 7 Update: Day 7: Day 6 Update: Day 6: Day 5 Update: Day 5: Day 4 Update: Day 4: Day 3 Update: Day 3: Day 2 Update: Day 2: Day 1 Update: Day 1:
Oh my goodness I need this badly! I have a huge pile of recipes that sit unorganized above my stove, I know where most recipes are but no one else does and this will make it not only so much easier to find but more useful for meal planning. Thanks for the good tips! Stopping by with Monday Mommy Blog Hop!
I hope you give this a try. I was amazed at how quickly once I sat down with all the supplies, I was able to do this. I had my 10-year old stuffing the recipes into the page protectors and then I organized them into the correct category. Thank you for stopping in! 🙂
I so need to do this my recipes are messy!
My recipes are all in one place … but not very organized at all! I would love to do this, but the problem is I have so many other areas of my life needing organizing right now. So in my head I evaluate a task’s priority against the multiple other tasks I need to get done and this one is far down the list! (Especially since I don’t cook from recipe cards very often.) But you have inspired me to get rid of the cards I come across that are not good recipes or mediocre ones. Why have I not thought of tossing them before? Ha! Thanks for laying this all out with such helpful tips and ideas, Jenny! And thanks so much for linking to Wedded Wed too, my friend!
I need to do this, plus leave some lined paper in the back so I can have a space to write down new recipes that I am writing. Ninety percent of the time I don’t follow a prewritten recipe, and when the outcome was really good and got high reviews from my family, I want to re-create it.
That’s a very good idea to keep some notebook paper in the back! 🙂 Thank you for the great idea!
Most excellent advice! I will be following along and apply some of your great ideas this summer – teachers only get to organize in the summer. 🙂 ~Kelly
unDeniably Domestic
Oh, my, how I need this! I have piles and stacks of recipes that fall on me every time I go searching for that one hidden favorite. This is on my to-do list!
Thanks so much for sharing at the Thrive @ Home Thursday link-up! This post will be featured as one of my faves this week!