Like many moms, I’ve collected recipes over the years from various sources. My family is a picky bunch and it’s taken years to settle on recipes that we all like.
Originally I had hand-written index cards, a large pile of recipes torn from magazines, various sauce splattered cookbooks, and recipes printed from the internet.
The whole collection was pretty much wrinkled, tossed in a heap on the bookshelf. Messy and disorganized. After spotting an organized, 3-ring cookbook binder at my sister’s house, I immediately copied the idea.
Gather all your family favorite recipes and put in one place. Get a plain old school binder. It doesn’t matter if the recipes are written on index cards, torn from magazines, or printed from the internet. Have your most organized child make categories for the binder (I used a 2″ binder) by labeling several tabbed page dividers into categories: appetizers, salads, main meals, desserts, and kids’ favs.
This same child can glue each recipe onto a piece of white standard-sized printer paper (make a copy of the back of index cards if there’s any writing). Slip each piece of paper into a protective plastic sleeve designed for three ring binders. Recipes can go back-to-back to use up both sides of the plastic sleeve. Have your child organize the recipes into the right categories. Delegate, because it can be tedious, but kids do seem to enjoy it.
My daughter smoothed out all the wrinkled magazine tear-outs and my scribbled handwritten recipes and glued them onto paper, drawing hearts around ones she really liked!
Have your most artistic child draw the cover of the cookbook, “Recipes We Actually All Like” and slip it into the binder’s front cover. Label the spine too. Keeping recipes in plastic sleeves means spills wipe up fast. It’s easy to add new recipes, write notes on the paper, or edit the collection. And this is one family friendly binder you will use over and over again.
photo credit: Paul Schultz
