If you are a digital lover for all things and just prefer to keep your paper footprint to a minimum, this Recipe Binder approach is likely not for you. Above all, this is very much a personal choice. But once they are all sorted, organized, and at your fingertips whenever you need them, you will reap the time- and sanity-saving benefits week after week! Why a Recipe Binder?īefore I dive into the “how to” of assembling a Recipe Binder, I think it’s first important to talk about the value of paper recipe organization versus digital methods. Organizing your recipes may seem like a big undertaking at the start. I’m not exaggerating when I say that having your recipes organized into an efficient and simple Recipe Binder system is the key to establishing and maintaining a good meal planning routine. And there’s no hunting through cookbooks, Pin accounts, or Instagram feeds for something I’ve been meaning to try. Filling both my meal planner and grocery list involves simply flipping through the pages (or referencing the Recipe Inventory under the inside cover) to find dishes that sound good for the week and transferring the needed ingredients right onto my printed grocery list.Ĭurious to see exactly how I meal plan? Learn my tried-and-true meal planning method! There’s no remembering what recipes we like or haven’t made in a while. That’s because I have 100% of my recipes organized into a single, categorized, easy-to-grab Recipe Binder. Doing this one task helps our entire household run a little lot smoother, ensuring that 1) I know what I’m putting on the table every night AND 2) have the ingredients on hand to do so.īut would you believe me if I told you this routine takes me all of about 10 minutes each week? Yep…10 minutes to both plan out our weekly meals AND populate a matching grocery list. But if there is one thing I do make time for…every single week…it’s to plan our meals and make a corresponding grocery list. There are lots of household routines I don’t have on lock. Would that be a meal time “game changer” for you? It was for me! The Relationship Between Recipe Organization & Meal Planning What if they were categorized in a way that not only made perfect sense to you and how you cook, but were also easy to reference, update, and maintain? Think about what it would be like to have ALL of your recipes (the ones you love, the ones you remember, the ones you hope to make someday) gathered into one spot. As a result, most of us make the same things over and over again, forget about particular dishes we love or meant to try, and/or begin to dread preparing meals for ourselves or our families. With recipes saved in so many different places, it can a total hassle (not to mention time consuming!) to hunt down a specific recipe…whether it’s for a special occasion or a normal Tuesday night dinner. These days, recipes are everywhere aren’t they?! It’s not uncommon to have recipes that you love or want to try printed in cookbooks, hand written onto recipe cards, printed out from your favorite blogs, or stored digitally on Pin boards, Instagram profiles, and even specialty apps. Get ready to move this organization project to the top of your To Do List! Today, I want to show you how to organize your recipes into a binder using my most popular printables ever: the Ultimate Kitchen Printable Pack.
Not only has it stood the test of time (going on 5 years of the exact same system!), but this Recipe Binder saves me significant time and reduces meal-time stress…meal after meal, day after day. That’s because it’s easily one of the best organizing projects I’ve ever tackled. Whenever I do my “best of the best” organizing posts, this Recipe Binder project is always at the very top of the list.