The Best Way to Organize Recipes (non-digital)

Do you organize recipes? I have been there and back again when it comes to finding the best way to keep track of recipes I like. It’s almost comical that this has to be a thing, doesn’t it? But it’s a good problem, I guess. It’s nice to have so much food and have so much variety that I can’t keep track of all the ways to cook my food in my head.

Keeping Track of Recipes Digitally

There are a lot of online ways to sort and organize recipes. I’ve tried several over the years. They’re super inspiring and do so much organization for you. Do you ever remember to check all the recipes you’ve saved over the years? If I don’t make it that day I almost never remember. There’s something about technology that’s so secure that I can safely hide things from myself.

I’m all about simple, every single time and technology often isn’t. I’m just not going to invest the time and effort into digital programs and apps. Most importantly, it’s unreliable. “Sorry, family. Can’t cook tonight. My battery’s dead. Internet’s down.” Besides, one inevitable kitchen disaster would strike and destroy my device. Are there others out there like me?

Organizing Recipes in a 3-Ring Binder

For years I used a 3-ring binder. I’d find a recipe online, print it off, and slide it into a plastic sleeve. I’d like to make it clear that I’m not obsessively neat. On the contrary, I find getting myself organized on any level a struggle. Hence this post. But there’s something so sloppy about sheets of paper with recipes of different sizes and colors.

Solution: I decided to type them all out. I was able to fit multiple recipes on a page. They were all in the same font, all tidy and grouped by similar ingredients. I put them into plastic sleeves and added tabs to the binder to mark different categories. I spent HOURS typing out recipes but it was satisfyingly organized.

…still not the best solution

That worked adequately for several years. But slowly my 3-ring binder turned into a place to shove recipes that I’d printed off to type out “someday.” I found myself sorting through stacks of printed pages that I needed to retype in order to find a single recipe. And then, it became outdated when I found a better version of a recipe or had new recipes that messed up my groupings.

There is nothing charming about a 3-ring binder but I was ok with that. I don’t know about your life, but mine isn’t always aesthetically pleasing. However, from a practical standpoint, the bindings wear out, the rings get bent and don’t pinch like they should. They’re big and bulky, and they take up a lot of space on my counter when I’m trying to cook.

Another Option in Organizing–Journals

Another solution that I’ve tried was a book that held all my recipes. I figured then I wouldn’t have random pieces of paper, no plastic sleeves, and could just write in new recipes as I found them. It so happened that about that time, I found an old copy of the Moosewood Cookbook at a flea market. It wasn’t even the recipes that interested me as much as the book itself. It’s gorgeous–all those handwritten recipes! Each page is a humble piece of art.

That led to more decisions to be made. Do you buy several ring-bound journal-sized books and have each book be a single category, like vegetables or desserts? If so, you may need a stack of books. What if you have more recipes than fit into one book? What do you do when you fill them up? Start volume 2? Do you need to create an index? Or do you just jumble all the main dish recipes together–a chicken dish followed by a venison recipe followed by a choose-your-own protein casserole recipe? Sigh.

This shouldn’t be so hard. Or maybe I’m just overly dramatic about the whole subject.

But on the other hand, recipes are something that most homemakers use multiple times a day. Every. Single. Day. Shouldn’t you have the best, most efficient system, just like anybody else in business?

Organizing Recipes in a Box

Ye old recipe box. The one that was in every woman’s kitchen for decades and decades, but has slowly fallen out of favor and became quaint grandma decor. Why did no one use them anymore? My mom had one with classic family recipes but even hers had been tucked away for years.

Maybe it was the advent of the computer age and its promise of eliminating paper clutter–ha!–that got women to abandon recipe boxes. If that was the case, it certainly hadn’t worked for me.

Why I Love a Recipe Box

The simplicity. It’s just a simple wooden box that takes up little space. This is the recipe box I use and love. You can pull out a recipe and set it into the groove on the top of the box to prevent a few of those inevitable stains.

Tangible memories. Cooking a recipe that an elderly relative wrote out in her best handwriting makes a dish special. If you were to look in the back of my mom’s recipe box, you’d find a “recipe” I wrote for her when I was about 3. It’s just a card filled with magenta colored scribbles, but it’s been in her box since I wrote it and probably presented it to her with a great sense of accomplishment.

You don’t have to hand-write every recipe to keep them in a recipe box, but that’s what I prefer to do. You can easily print it in a 4×6 or 3×5 size onto card stock. If you end up deciding that you don’t like a recipe, you can throw it away and it won’t throw off your system. You can have as many categories as you like, which makes finding the recipe you need very easy.

The flexibility. Toss out recipe cards you won’t ever make again. As you plan your menus for the week, pull out a stack of recipes you’re going to make over the next few days. If your kitchen is like mine and you have a hood above your stove, you can use a magnet to hold your recipe in easy view while you cook.

Here’s a tip. Try a new recipe out before you write it on a card. But if you like it enough to make it again, then write it onto a recipe card right away. Copying a single recipe is a quick job.

If there’s one thing that’s exasperating, it’s spending time trying to retrace your steps online to find a recipe you made last month or scroll through weeks of text messages to find the screenshot someone sent you. As soon as you write it down, you won’t have to remember where you found it. Believe it or not, it really helps relieve you of mental clutter.

Keep a variety of blank recipe cards and index cards in the back of my box. I have to say, though, that I’m disappointed in the recipe cards they’re making these days. They have little beauty and the quality is poor. (I’m working on a solution. But that’s for another day. Stay tuned.)