She also made me a great binder last Christmas to organize all of the recipes I liked. And now that I have time on my hands, I finally got to tackle the big recipe project.
Step 1 - Sit on your couch, purple Sharpie in hand, and slowly go through the magazine marking all of the recipes you want and then tear them out. Since some pages have three or more recipes on them, I found that it was important to actually mark which recipe you wanted, otherwise it would cause confusion later when I went back to organize everything.
Step 2 - Put your torn out recipes into little piles you've made on your coffee table. Mine ended up being: Appetizers, Side Dishes, Soups, Breakfast, Main Dishes, Desserts, Drinks, Misc.
(Repeat Steps 1 & 2 for the 13 magazines that are in your pile!)
Step 3 - This is the anal step, you can skip it. Since I had SO MANY recipes, I was afraid that I would need about 8 more books if I didn't consolidate them (since you'll often have one full page with only 1 recipe that you want up in the corner). So I went through each pile and played a little game of cut and paste. I also trimmed off the frayed edges of some of the pages - but again, that's pretty anal and I currently have a lot of time on my hands.
Step 4 - Assemble into your binder!
I ran out of sleeves towards the end, but basically it's done and I LOVE IT! I was sitting on the couch last night just flipping through the book and reading the recipes. And when the next issue comes, it'll be so easy to just add to the book.
5 comments:
Doesn't it feel so good to get stuff like that done?
My own two cents that may or may not help you: I keep all my torn out recipes in a pile until I've tried them. Then we decide whether they're worth repeating or not. If not, obviously I recycle them. If so, they go in my recipe box (after I've hand-copied them onto index cards).
The problem with my system is that I so prefer to try out new recipes all the time that I rarely repeat even the good ones! And by the time I HAVE repeated something once or twice, unless it's very complicated (in which case I am very UNlikely to repeat it much, if ever), I usually have it memorized, also making the index card useless.
No system is perfect, I guess. :)
my book is referred to as the "world's best cookbook." i used to put multiple recipes on each page, too, but i found that some were never made and had to be tossed...and then alphabetical order was totally screwed up. alphabetical order is critical around here. CRITICAL. we're pretty much one recipe per page people, and i go through the book at least once every couple of months to reevaluate which recipes deserve space in the world's best cookbook.
I've done this myself, and I add post-its or other stickies to favorites. I should go through it and look for recipes to throw out, but as I barely have time to heat up leftovers, that may take a while. I add Weight Watcher point values to see if it's even worth keeping for us. If I could, I'd even organize it within your categories by season so I knew what to cook at what time of year. How's that grab you, Monica Geller Girl?
You're reminding me that I have a Cooking Light somewhere to look through.
Been meaning to do this too, so I just started, a few mags at a time, right? Let me know if you have an interest in looking through my everyday food mags to scavenge good recipes I've left behind.
In addition to folders for various apps, main dishes and desserts (I always make sure I write notes in the recipe right after cooking it the first time so that I remember what I liked and didn't like) I also keep an entertaining binder. For example, I put all of the recipes I used for thanksgiving 2007 in one section along with a quick cover page of who was there, what I served and how everything went. Same for Christmas and other get togethers. That way I'm not stuck remembering what I did the year before and whether it was good or not!
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