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Organizing recipes

If you're like me and enjoy cooking, the hardest part can be deciding what to fix each night for dinner.  I feel like I make the same few things every week and am looking for new and exciting recipes to try that my family will eat.  Pinterest overwhelms me and those food videos on social media are often high calorie snacks and not real meals.  One of my favorite recipe sites is allrecipes.com because you can search by ingredients on hand, search with exclusions (ie mushrooms if your kids don't like them, or to avoid allergens) and you can see real ratings and reviews.



I like to have recipes on hand so it's easier for me to see ingredients and steps, without going back to my phone.  So I print them out and put them in the clear page protectors (I'm a messy cook!). If the family decides it is a win, then I'll file it away in my recipe binder.

Surprise, surprise, since moving it's been harder to keep up with the recipes.  For the entire month of May we ate out of the freezer, whatever was quick and easy since I was a single mom with the hubby working his new job 7 hours away...  But this summer I've had a chance to try out new recipes but never got around to filing them.

First, I made a BIG sorting mess.  Recipes everywhere and I put them in categories.  I tried to keep like items together - whole meat (roasts, etc before ground meats) and Italian foods grouped together and Mexican foods.  I threw out recipes that were 10 years or older that I'd never made.  I threw about recipes that are too complicated to make, or not worth the hassle.  No use in keeping dead weight in my binder!



I had a big 3 inch binder that was duct taped in multiple places and it needed to be replaced anyway.  I decided to bring down the weight of a big heavy binder by breaking them down into sub categories.  Here is a picture of my final product - the outer binders with labels to easily grab off the shelf.  They're lighter and I put them in categories where I would easily grab a binder off the shelf and know exactly what was in it.



Now, to show you how I broke down the binders into sub-categories, I'm showing my Main Dishes book.  I used these tabs that are removable so that I can change them at any time with ease. I have also seen online that there are people who use the same types of tabs along the top of the binders with the days of the week to help find that week's recipes.  Slow Cooker, Pork, Vegetarian, Chicken/Turkey, Beef, Fish & Instant Pot are the categories



I used these tabs from Amazon and really like them.  I've been using them for years. They don't smudge and are still sticky after years of use!




I hope this inspires you to organize your recipes and get in that kitchen!  Comment with a link to your favorite recipe - I'm always looking for new things to make!

*Disclaimer: The above are affiliate links.  Solutions for Sanity is a participant in the Amazon Affiliates program which means that this site can earn a small fee through linking to Amazon.com. Amazon offers a small percentage of the sale at no cost to you. Only purchases made through this link will be compensated to me.  

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