11 [31 days] how do you organise your recipes?
Saturday, October 15th, 2011
pinkbeary says:
how do you organize your recipes?
The answer is quite complicated (but worth it) so hang in there 
I used to use plastic display files (Flipfiles) to organise my recipes and I had one for main recipes, one for baking/ desserts and one for recipes to try.
The problem seemed to be that 1) I wasn’t getting to any of them and was just cooking our favourites except for special occasions and 2) our tastes kept getting fussier and fussier.
On number 2 above, since the babies (my two-year-old twins) started eating our food at 1 year, I cook much healthier (!) so less fatty, more veggie-laden meals. And I was a healthy cook to start!
I have found since I pin things on Pinterest, the recipes are all easily accessible and when I’ve made some of those pinned recipes, I takemy netbook to the kitchen counter, click through and start cooking/ baking. So there’s no need to print out very much anymore.
Bonus – kinder for the environment, less for me to file! LOL
The paper in my kitchen has been bugging me though so this evening I took all of my flipfiles and I made a couple of piles:
I tossed all the recipes that realistically, I would never make – isn’t this picture so satisfying?! Freedom!
I thought you’d like to see my sandals that my son, Connor, is quite taken with, I think because of the blue beads (I paid about R40 – R50 at Mr Price 3 – 4 years ago, if not longer)
Then I made some new piles:
- Our family favourites
- Recipes to try – mains
- Recipes to try – baking and desserts
This year I set a goal to try at least 2 new recipes every month on my 37 things list (I make a list on my birthday in August every year).
So far, so good, even though it’s been very loosey-goosey and I’ve scrambled in the last week of the month for the last two months.
If any of the recipes become family favourites, I’ll move them from their current flipfiles to the family favourites one (which only has about 6 recipes at the moment). Haven’t had any of those yet except for the one below.
This month, and for the rest of the year til Aug 2012, I’m going to choose one recipe to try every weekend so that if it doesn’t work out at the last minute, there’s no scramble to make my goal for the end of the month.
I’ve already made The Most Delicious Pumpkin Bread (we don’t have canned pumpkin here in South Africa so I used 500g and it was perrrrrrrfect). It was so good I’m going to make another batch because we all polished it off and I didn’t even get any pictures.
So, how do you organise your recipes?
And are there any “must-try” recipes you want to recommend to me?
Remember they’ve got to be relatively healthy and I don’t spend more than 30 minutes tops in the kitchen
