Where do you keep your favorite recipes? Are they in cut-out form, floating freely in a shoe box in a cabinet somewhere? Maybe you’re more organized and use an arbitrary alphabetical system. Is your apricot pudding recipe filed under “a” or “p”?  Or you might own a slowly disintegrating library of specialty cookbooks and only have a few favorites from each one. If you rely on your favorite recipes, why not get it together and load up some recipe software?

Busy cooks can be proud of themselves for creating a custom cookbook in a binder.

Sometimes, when you are busy creating the kind of recipes that cause your family members and houseguests to declare you the World’s Best Food Maker Ever, you can lose sight of the importance of organization.

Once you’ve spent time putting all of your culinary inspiration on paper and dragging out the ever elusive three-hole punch so that you can file them away in your super tough sexy kitchen binder, it’s natural to just want to sit back and enjoy the feeling of awesomeness that is sure to follow.

Not to rain on your parade, but you aren’t finished. Unless you made that cookbook to sit on a high shelf and look pretty, it’s going to get splattered. You will crack an egg and inadvertently drag mucus across its pages. Your dog will bump your knee while begging for a drop of cookie dough and you’ll accidently toss a shiny chocolate chip onto the recipe page where it will go unnoticed until it becomes one with the paper. Even if you do manage to carefully scrape it off, it’s gonna leave a mark.

Do you want this kind of crusty chaos mucking up your beautiful collection of culinary inspiration? No. Don’t try to add vintage charm to your cookbook with unidentifiable splats and splatters. Go the extra foot. Drop your recipes in recipe page protectors. Hey, you won’t have to bother with the elusive three-hole punch that way, either.

Pavarotti once said, “One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.”

I have to think that the type of eating he refers to here is not the type that most of us succumb to on a daily basis. When Pavarotti said, “stop,” I don’t think he was talking about the few seconds that our car is in park at the drive-through window. I don’t even think he was talking about the half hour we have at the office to eat the turkey sandwich with mustard and tomato that we so rarely think to bring with us. I think he was talking about dinner.

Dinner. When I was a kid, we sat at the table. We may have eaten spaghetti, but the sauce was at least mostly homemade: canned tomatoes with ground beef, mushrooms and peppers, garlic bread on the side with a salad to boot. We sat down. We passed the food around the table. We waited until everyone’s plate was full, and then we ate. We didn’t always say grace, but we were thankful for our meals and for our seats.

I know what you’re thinking: “Well, that’s beautiful but someone’s got to do the cooking.” “I’m a working mom.” “I’m a busy woman.” “My family’s schedule is too crazy. We don’t have time to sit down together.”

A recipe organizer can help your family come together

To that I say, dinner should be relaxing; family time is rare but not impossible. I believe a great dinner begins with the cooking. When there is time to cook a meal for the whole family, why not relish it? Cooking can be a chore, but what if it weren’t? What if we put on a little of our favorite music? What if our recipes were organized so that we could actually make the recipes that make our families? What if we served dinner in glass dishes instead of in the pots and pans which we cooked? What if our kids set the table? What if everyone cleared their own dishes?

I know what you’re thinking: “Well, that’s beautiful but it won’t work in my house.”

To that I say, why not?

What about our dinners differ from those of Pavarotti? Effort. Pavarotti obviously loved to sit down and eat, and he would not have traded those moments for anything else. Let’s start making an effort. Let’s stop whatever it is we’re doing- the dishes, the homework, the arguments, the worrying- let’s think about good things, and let’s eat dinner together.

Please feel free to contact us regarding our recipe organizers. This is what we do. We want to help you and your family become experts at dinnertime. 

While the holiday season has many virtues including gift giving and receiving, as we get older much of the focus turns to the foods we get to enjoy at this time of year. Cookies, candies and even some side dishes and meats are only prepared in this narrow time span. Which is probably a good thing considering that many of the dishes we look forward to are not exactly health conscience.

So you had a really great time and maybe you overindulged a bit and raided the cookie jar or candy dish a few times too many. Now it is time to face the music and the resolutions you will make going into a new year. Out comes the scales, the water bottle and those low calorie meals that will quickly seem boring and routine. Time to hit the treadmill and attempt to come up with menu options that are appetizing and will pare down some of that spare tire or muffin top you’ve acquired. Oops, muffin is a dirty word in the world of healthy eating. Or is it?

A way to ease the painful transition from going all out and preparing those scrumptious high calorie holiday treats to the more mundane world of healthy eating is to keep that recipe card handy while in the kitchen.

Most of us need to have our top-secret extraordinary recipes in front of us when making those memorable holiday specialties. To turn that dish into a healthier treat you can enjoy year-round; as you are peering over the ingredients, think of ways to tweak that recipe into more diet-friendly fare. Keep your recipe cards handy and jot down reduced calorie or lower fat alternatives that might just work as well as those less healthy ones.
Easy replacements include alternatives to real sugar and fat-free dairy products. However, what about making some substitutions for that traditional turkey dinner and enjoying a lighter version a few months later? Roasted vegetables in place of those fat laden buttery mashed potatoes with gravy makes a perfect accompaniment to a lovely turkey breast. The holiday aura is there but without the guilt associated with the high calorie version.

When you reach for the rolling pin, bowls and luscious ingredients during this holiday season, make sure to contact us for more ideas and keep those recipe cards handy to jot down healthier ingredient options to help you keep those New Year resolutions.

Please take a look at our selection of recipe keepers as well as recipe cards.

I loved this Sushi chef’s handiwork:

Having chickens in an urban environment can be a great way to get fresh eggs for all those recipes! Here are some advantages to consider when owning your own mini flock!

• Fresh Eggs Delivered Right to your Backyard!
• You always know how your chickens were treated (With lots of love!)
• You know “eggs-actly” what went into making those eggs!
• Chickens provide lots of entertainment!
• Natural weeders and bug eaters (to help protect your garden)

Do you own your own chickens? What are some of the advantages YOU find to having them?

Here are some of my favorite Chicken and Rooster Recipe Binders: