How to Organize Recipes

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Krista Colivn a professional organizer and owner of The Shebang, the smart woman's guide to doing it all. I'm going to show you a simple way to organize all your recipes. First, gather them all up, I know you have them everywhere. So whether it's the little recipe cards that your mom has sent you, something you've pulled from a magazine, and of course I'm sure you've got different emails that have been sent to you and also things you've downloaded from the Internet and also plenty of recipes from your Sunday newspaper. So, gather them all up and then sort them by category. When you sort them by category it's a great time to take a look at them and really determine, am I really going to make this, will my family like it, do I even like it and how difficult is the recipe. So based on your current lifestyle, is it something you're going to make? Sort them by categories and a great way to look at the different categories is to have a recipe organizer. So it would be really easy to take these out and spread them on the table and use them as your dividers as your sorting out your different recipes. I love using a binder. Another great system is this piece right here which folds closed and when you open it up it stands nicely on your counter top. So it doesn't have to stay out all the time but it makes it real easy to see your recipes. And using a sheet protector is great to make sure you get to keep your recipe for a long time so that it doesn't get batter on it or whatever that's getting on it. Also you can take it back a step and create your own recipe binder which is what I've done for my family and I've used the categories that were most common to our situation and I've purchased sheet protectors and also the great page dividers that have pockets. So these have pockets on both sides so it's really easy if you don't have time to really organize your recipe binder as you're pulling new items out of cook books or on line; print it out and just stick it in the pocket and save it for later. And another tip could be you could keep it in the pocket until you've made it and decided if it's a keeper or not. If it's a keeper then it becomes worthy of a sheet protector. So, just a simple way to gather up all your recipes and have them in one place."