A Recipe for Success

Winter days in February mean cocooning time, which usually means more time in the kitchen. Getting a handle on all of your favorite recipes can be a challenge. How frustrating is it when you can't find gram's tried-and-true meatloaf recipe for that last pound of ground beef in the freezer?! If you have old scraps of newspaper, magazine pages, post-it notes with friends' hastily scribbled recipes all stuffed in a drawer or in one of those old index card boxes, or dog-eared cookbooks with little pieces of paper crammed in between the pages, you are not alone! Now is a great time to get it all organized, so here are some tips to make your time in the kitchen a little less harried and a little more efficient.

• You will need a 1.5 to 2-inch, 3-ring binder, one or two sets of tabbed dividers, and an assortment of heavy-weight page protectors, both full-page and those that are divided in sections (designed for items like photos and CD's), and one three-hole punched plastic pocket.
• Sort through all of your recipes, keeping those you use and discarding those that you know are too complicated, or that you've tried and not loved, or that you know you will never have the occasion to use. If that recipe for bacon-flavored doughnuts has been sitting unused in your recipe file for several years, it's time to face reality and let it go!
• As you sort and purge, divide your recipes into categories. These categories should be ones that are tailored to the way you like to cook. It may be categories like beef dishes, poultry dishes, veggies, starches, desserts and appetizers. Or main dishes, side dishes and salads. You may need more categories for baking, if that's your passion. Whatever term comes to mind when you go looking for that recipe later should be the category under which you file it. Keep your categories somewhat broad - fewer categories will make it easier to maintain your system.
• Label the tabbed dividers with your categories.
• Put each recipe into a page-protector. You can generally put two recipes back-to-back in each page-protector if only the recipe on one side is important. For those smaller pieces of paper, like index cards and post-it notes, use the divided page-protectors.
• Place your recipes, now in page-protectors, into their designated categories in your binder. Only those recipes that are tried-and-true belong in these sections!
• Label the plastic pocket "To Be Tried", or "Possibilities", and put it in the front of the binder. In this pocket go recipes that you haven't yet tried for future use. When you clip a new recipe, put it in this pocket until you've tried it. Make a point, every six months to a year, to go through this pocket and get rid of any recipes that you know you won't use, or that didn't work for your family.
• Put extra page protectors at the end of the binder so that you can "promote" any new recipe to its permanent section when you've tried it and it works in your life.
• For those cookbooks that only have one or two valued recipes that are regularly used, make photocopies of those recipes, pop them into your binder, and donate the cookbook.
• And one more tip to make the holidays a little more organized: Separate out all those holiday recipes and put them into a smaller binder of a different color. Divide into sections according to holiday, and everything will be at your fingertips when you go to prepare for that special holiday meal or party.

Whether you love spending time in your kitchen, or you want to get in and out as quickly as possible, having your recipes organized and ready when you need them makes everything run more smoothly!

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