How To Organize Your Recipes

One of the biggest ways to help our budget is monthly meal planning.  I have been doing monthly plans for over 2 years now.  Recipe organization goes hand in hand with meal planning!  I waited way too long to organize my recipes.  My recipe organization was in dire need. So join me as I tackle the deep dark abyss known as my recipe nook!

Recipes:

As you can see from below, my recipes were a mess.  My recipe folders were inundated with kids papers, pictures and so many other things that didn’t belong there.

Organizing:

To organize my recipes, I bought a 2″ binder, and sheet protectors.  I started by putting all my recipes in sheet protectors, even if they were little papers ripped out of a magazine.  Down the road I can change that if I decide to, but I needed to just get them into sheet protector to start organizing.  I sorted out many old recipes that I was never going to make and removed the pictures and artwork.

Categories:

Once I had all the recipes in sheet protectors, I needed to figure out how I wanted to categorize my recipes.  Keep in mind, I use my recipes when I meal plan and so I wanted to organize it that way.  I made a list of several categories and then kept narrowing it down until I felt good about my list.

The categories I decided on are: Drinks/Appetizers, Bread/Breakfast, Mexican, Italian, Hearty Home Cooking, Soup/Sandwiches, Garden, Sides, Desserts, Holiday, and Kyle (my husband wanted a special spot for the few recipes he has).   I realize those are not the normal categories for a recipe binder, but it will help when it is time to make my meal plan.  I actually have similar categories on Pinterest when I save recipes.

To organize the binder into categories, I bought tabs that could go onto the sheet protectors.  Standard file folders with tab dividers are not big enough to stick out past the sheet protectors.

Buy the sheet protectors Here or buy the tabs Here

I used my label maker to type out each category, then placed the labels on the tabs.  I also added scrapbook paper to each category to add some color.

Now that my recipes are organized, my meal plans will be much easier to make.

Check Out How To Make A Monthly Meal Plan!

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