How to Organize Recipes

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but there is a major generational gap in our kitchens. The gap I’m referring to is not with our cooking styles, or how often we cook, although those could arguably be different from generations before us as well. The gap I’m talking about is how we organize our recipes. Growing up, I remember seeing card boxes full of recipes that had been passed down from older family members to my mom. The only cookbook she had was the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook because it had every single recipe a midwest American family of the 1980s would need.

While many of us Gen X and Gen Yers also have recipe books and a few recipe cards, we have a much different style of organizing our recipes: electronically. Today I’m going to give you a few tips on how to organize recipes, both electronically as well as on paper. Pick the method or methods that work best for you, and soon you will have an organized system to plan your meals each week. There is no right or wrong way to do this as long as you know where to find the recipe you need, when you need it.

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Option #1: Organize Recipes Online

Since we are in the 21st century, let’s start with the most technologically advanced methods of organizing recipes. In terms of organizing your recipes electronically, I would recommend the big cooking websites as a place to start. My favorites are allrecipes.com and food.com. Both of these websites give you the ability to create profiles, upload recipes, and search through recipes that other users have shared. You can also search by ingredients, ratings, see tips and modifications other home chefs have written in reviews, and print out recipes (if you want to keep one foot in the pre-electronic age).  

If you want to rely heavily on your mobile devices, Allrecipes has an app that I am in love with. It’s called the Dinner Spinner. It’s like a game and digital recipe book combined. Once you find a recipe that you want to keep, simply add it to your favorites and you’ll have it at your fingertips the next time you need it. I uploaded my super easy and delicious recipes for Salsa Verde Pork and for Crock-Pot Chicken.  

And now for something a bit less technological…..

Option #2: Organize Recipes in a Binder

If you like your recipes a bit more old-school, the next few tips are for you because they involve actual paper.

If you’re like me, you subscribe to a number of magazines that have recipes in them every month. Instead of keeping the entire magazine, simply cut out the recipe you want to use and three hole punch it to go into a binder.

A good recipe binder should have page divider tabs to keep your recipes categorized by the main ingredient. Common tabs would be poultry, beef and lamb, pork, vegetarian, soups, side dishes, breakfast, and desserts. Whenever you find a new recipe, immediately file it into your recipe binder. The great thing about a recipe binder is that it is always full of recipes you like or want to try. Since there is no use holding onto a recipe you don’t like, as soon as you discover that you or your family aren’t too keen on a recipe, immediately remove it and toss it in the trash.

Option #3: Organize Recipes into Books

I’m a sucker for big, colorful recipe books. There is something about holding a recipe book in my hands and looking at the pictures of the perfect plates of food that inspires me. The problem with recipe books is that most of them only have a handful of recipes I actually want to make.

If you insist on having recipe books in your kitchen, invest in sticky tabs that you can use to mark your favorite recipes in each book. You can write on the tab to help you more easily find the recipe you want when you want it. Or, if you find that there are only 10 recipes out of 200 that you actually use, consider photocopying the recipes you enjoy, filing them in your recipe binder, and then passing the cookbook on to a friend, a second hand bookstore, or donating it to a nonprofit. Someone out there may like 150 of the 200 recipes, so let them enjoy exploring the recipe book while you enjoy the recipes you actually like to eat. Holding on to just your favorites will save you storage space, as well as time when you need to find something for dinner.

Option #4: Organize Recipes on Cards

This tip is the most sentimental. Many of us have recipe cards or other small scraps of paper with scribbled down instructions for our favorite dishes. The challenge with this method is that the scraps of paper and small cards can easily get lost. If you get anxious at the thought of throwing away a recipe that was written by your great-grandmother, consider taking a picture of the recipe and printing it out on a sheet of paper to put in your recipe binder. Then tuck the card or scraps of paper safely away in a memory box for safe keeping. This way you can still get the same warm, fuzzy feeling when you use the recipe, but you don’t chance spilling oil or other ingredients on the actual card.

If your recipes aren’t sentimental, but you simply prefer to use recipe cards, make sure that your recipe card box is set up similarly to the recipe binder. Use separator tabs to mark the different categories of your recipes, and toss any that you find yourself always skipping over because you don’t really like how it tastes.

These are just a few suggestions on how to organize recipes that I use in my own kitchen. What methods do you use for organizing recipes in your home? I would love to hear your ideas! Share them on my Facebook wall, or tweet me @thedomesticceo.

Until next time, I’m the Domestic CEO, helping you love your home.