How to Get Your Recipes Super-Organized

Are your kitchen drawers and cupboards overflowing with ‘potentially useful’ recipes? Get your recipes super-organized with my simple workflow!

If you’re anything like me, you horde a whole bunch of recipes because they seem like they might be useful one day. Then you have to face the awful task of sorting through them. A task which, of course, you keep putting off.

One year I got so fed up of that unwieldy pile of recipes that I finally took the bull by the horns. I organized my family recipes and my entire recipe collection!

The good news is that the simple, step-by-step approach I used made the task not so awful after all. Try it yourself and you’ll soon have your recipes in order.

Here are the simple steps I used to achieve a super-organized recipe collection.

5 steps to getting your recipes organized

1. Schedule your recipe sorting

On my weekly schedule I set aside no more than one hour to review and sort, keep or toss recipes in my recipe collection.  I scheduled myself to do this while watching a favorite television show on a specific night.

2. Make a folder for each type of recipe

While watching the TV show, I glanced at a recipe (very easy for us habitual multi-taskers) to determine if it was something I truly wanted to make, or had made and liked. If it passed either test, I added it to a pile of recipes of similar type (e.g. desserts, salads, entrees).

At the end of the hour, I created a file folder for each type of recipe. If the recipe type was a new category, I gave it a new file folder. Otherwise, I added recipes to file folders I had made on a previous evening of sorting. I placed these alphabetically in a cardboard box.

3. Sort your recipes again

When I had reviewed all of my recipe collection and tossed the losers, I had a nice box full of categorized file folders.

I was certainly in a much better place than previously!

I could have chosen to stop there, and continue my old ways of clipping and hoarding, but instead I went one step further: I sorted the recipes again.

After the second sort, I had a manageable and organized recipe collection that I was truly interested in keeping.

4. Create a Recipe Collection Cookbook

My final step was to get the paper copies of these recipes into electronic form.

About that time I was in the process of developing Matilda’s Fantastic Cookbook Software. So I used my recipe collection as a way to test the cookbook software’s easy-to-use recipe template. Plus it helped turn my good intentions of creating a super-organized recipe collection into a reality.

Whenever I want a recipe, all I do is search by recipe name in the search bar on the bottom of the recipe template and print any recipe as needed.

5. Repeat your recipe organization yearly

I use the same file folders I created for my original recipe collection for sorting and to store new clippings and ideas.

Every year I go through the files and cull them out for entering in my cookbook software’s recipe template.

In this way, I make sure I keep my recipe collection super-organized and don’t hoard loads of recipes I’ll never use.

Happy New Year Cookbooking,

Erin

P.S. Have you seen our terrific products to coordinate with Matilda’s Fantastic Cookbook Software?  We’ve got really nice, high quality binders to store your recipes, section dividers complete with pre-printed tab labels, and page protectors to keep the splatters off.  Take a look at our Cookbook People Store.