Simple Recipe Binder

Ok, confession time.  I cannot cook.  Like at all.  Easy mac... not so easy for me.  As a result, Melissa does all of the cooking around here.  Up until now, the way she "organized" her recipes, was writing them down on whatever scrap of paper was handy.  This led to tons of scrap pieces of paper floating all over our kitchen.

This system clearly didn't work.  Melissa could never find the recipe she needed.  The instructions were usually quickly copied down from a website, so they were hard to read.  And they frequently got food splashed all over them.  So I did what any good organization loving girlfriend would do, I stepped in and made a simply recipe binder to hold all our family's favorite recipes.

I had actually been planning this project for quite some time, I just hadn't gotten around to actually doing it.  I got the kick in the rear I needed from a reader who emailed me asking if I had a post on a recipe binder.  This gave me the motivation to finally tackle this project that had been on my to-do list for way to long.  And I'm so glad I did!

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I used this binder, instead of a fabric planner like most of my other organizers, since it would be in the kitchen and around messy food a bunch.  The plastic cover makes it easy to wipe clean, should any spills ever happen.  The front sleeve also allows you to slip in a decorative cover, which is exactly what I did.

To make my cover, I used my Sillhouette to cut out my title on white cardstock.  I used the negative space left after peeling up the cut letters, and attached the white cardstock onto a larger piece of blue carstock (cut to fit in the binder cover).

I then used the leftover letters cut out from my cover to decorate the spine a little as well.  This way, when the binder is sitting on the shelf, we can still easily tell what it is!

Once the outsides were all prettied up, it was time to get to the meat and potatoes of my recipe binder (pun totally intended).  As with the rest of my organizers, I started by dividing it into appropriate sections using these dividers.

I separated my binder into the following sections:

• Breakfast
• Lunch
• Dinner
• Snacks
• Drinks

This way, each recipe can be placed in the appropriate section, so we can quickly find what we're looking for.  This also helps with meal planning, since we'll have all our favorite recipes at our finger tips when planning out dinners for the week.

Inside each section I slipped a couple recipe pages.  Each page holds all the vital information needed to make each recipe.

The top has places for the recipe name, serving size and prep time.  The rest of the page is where you can write the ingredients and instructions for making the meal.

This binder will also be super helpful for writing out grocery lists.  As soon as we write our meal plan for the week, we can flip to each meal's recipe page, and copy down the ingredients we'll need to pick up at the store!

And that finishes up the tour of my brand spankin' new recipe binder!  Now I just need to learn how to use the recipes in my binder ;)

This recipe page should be up in my Etsy shop shortly, so make sure to keep your eye out!  I'll update this post with the link as soon as the listing goes live.

How do you organize your recipes?  Any tips you'd like to share for meal planning, or keeping your kitchen organized and running smoothly?  Let me know in the comments below!