10 Ways to Organize Your Favorite Recipes

We researched 10 Ways to Organize Your Favorite Recipes
and have them at your fingertips
for meal planning and grocery shopping.

 

PLUS we’re sharing the favorite personalized recipe albums

our customers love for their family recipes.

They make a perfect gift for your off-to-college child, a new bride, or the friend going off to the mission, and she wants to take all the family favorites along. (And add the new recipes she’s sure to acquire in the new country.)

My favorite recipe album sale was adding a family’s mother’s recipes, written in her hand, to the pages of one of our albums. They were having a family reunion and one of the sisters’ gifted all her siblings with their mother’s recipes! So precious.

 

 

Organize with a Recipe Box and Cards

Years ago my dad gave me a brightly colored tin recipe box.

I have no idea what inspired him, because he almost never gave us gifts.

When I think of that, and his busy farmer life, and the fact he had 10 children, I’m surprised he even got inspired to give the infrequent gifts he did.

One of the funnier gift stories about him is how he kept giving mom clear glass pitchers every few years. She ended up with about 4 that looked so much alike most people probably thought she bought them all at the same time. They certainly got used, over and over, sometimes all at the same meal. When the table was stretched from one end of the dining room to the other and surrounded by family. Good times.

Preserve your recipe cards in the box with clear card protectors, like these from Amazon.

 

 

3 Ring Binder and Handwritten or Typed Recipes

So, back to the tin recipe box that’s jam packed with recipes I seldom use anymore. (But I’ll never get rid of because of the memories they evoke. Like a diary, I look at a recipe, and remember who I got it from and where I was at the time.) The few that became favorites I rewrote and put in my everyday cooking binder.

A binder is an awesome way to organize recipes.

My binder is falling apart, held together on the spine with pretty floral duct tape. It was a gift, and almost every time I use a recipe I say a prayer for the friend who gifted it to me. Her life has held so much pain and separation. Her happiest times were when they lived near us and the bad times hadn’t yet begun. That’s how I remember her, with fondness.

 

 

3 Ring Binder with Clear Page Protectors or an Accordion File Folder

I don’t have an accordion file folder, but part of a file drawer near my computer has a bulging regular file of recipes I’ve saved from magazines, or that I never used so took them out of my everyday cookbook binder.

If you don’t have enough file drawers, an accordion file on a shelf would do just fine. You can label the sections just like a cookbook with tab dividers.

Clear page protectors in a binder would do the same thing as an accordion file. Just slip the collected recipes into the page pockets, and they won’t go anywhere. Then organize them into sections with tab dividers.

 

 

Organize Your Favorite Recipes with an Electronic App

There are lots of options for organizing recipes electronically: with an app, or scanning them into a word program and saving them in a file in your documents.

I like the idea of using an app, because then you have them with you wherever you are.

So if you’re with friends and they want a recipe you took to potluck, you can zing it over to them with the touch of a few keys.

I haven’t actually used a recipe saving app, but these are a few I found when I did some research:

• Pepperplate. People give it good reviews. Costs $3/mo or $33/year.
• Paprika Recipe Manager. Free for up to 50 recipes. Isn’t cloud saved, so might be harder to share recipes with others.
• Recipe Keeper Pro. Costs $5 for each device you want it on. Very good reviews other than that.
• Yummly. This is a free online app that looks like fun. You can import your own recipes, and also switch up a recipe you find from other recipe sites. After you alter a recipe it shows up as your recipe. You can always go back to the original recipe, tho. Another good part about this app: you can keep a record of what you have in your pantry, then ask Yummly to find a saved recipe using ingredients you have on hand. You can also have “taste-buds”: friends you invite to your list to share ideas and recipes with. I think this is the one I’d try first.
• Flipp. Yes, I know, this isn’t a recipe saving app. However, it is one I use and like very much. You save your shopping list on the app and it tells you which store has that item on sale. It gives you the ads for the stores nearest you when you enter your zip code. That’s the main way I use it, but there are lots of other money saving tips and helps on the app.

 

 

Which is your favorite way to organize recipes?