How To Make A Recipe Organizer Binder

My project for the second half of my week was to organize my miscellaneous recipes that I had clipped from magazines and newspapers.  I’m ashamed to say this but I had the plastic shopping bag full of recipes for well over 7+ years. This bag moved with me from our past house and has sat in a drawer, collecting more recipes.  I didn’t know how to organize them so they turned into clutter. Every time I looked at the bag, I felt guilty for not dealing with it.

Well, this week I was trying to organize and arrange my new kitchen cabinet that my husband installed. (If you are new to this site, we are in the process of remodeling our kitchen. My husband is building the kitchen cabinets himself.) As I was doing that, I emptied a wheeled plastic cabinet minus one thing. My bag of recipes.  I knew that I didn’t want to leave this large and unsightly cabinet downstairs for just my recipes so I pulled out the bag and placed it on my kitchen counter.  I didn’t know what to do with it or where to put it, but I knew that I didn’t want it where it was.  So, there it sat, on my counter for almost a week.  Yes, it bugged me and I didn’t like it, but I didn’t know what to do with it. Finally, I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and deal with the bag. Either throw out the recipes or organize them. I posted on Facebook for any ideas that people may have.

After getting a few ideas, I came up with a system.  It consisted of using colored paper for my different categories.  I used double-sided tape to stick the recipes to the colored paper.  This saved me from having to rewrite the many recipes that I had.  I also left room on the colored paper for me to make notes on about the recipe.  Some pages have more than one recipe on them.  After all the recipes where sorted and taped to the appropriate color page, I slid the page into a 3-ring page protector.  All of the pages were placed in a D-ring binder.

I tried to use divider tabs in the binder, but standard tabs aren’t big enough to see past the page protectors. I ended up just putting the name of that category in the front of each color.

I found in my bag a list of common substitutions and a list of weights and measures.  I thought they seemed pretty handy so I placed them right behind the index in the front of the book.

After all the recipes were sorted and placed in the binder, I added an additional 5 page protectors with paper to each category so when I want to add more recipes, I’m not hunting around for my colored paper.

Some of the paper was regular weight and others were card stock weight. I don’t think it really matters what kind of paper you use, other than your binder may not be able to hold as many pages if you were to use the card stock weight.

The total cost of the project was $0.00. Yes, you read that right. It did not cost me anything to make this binder.  I had all of the supplies on hand.  The D-ring bind is a 2″ binder that was inside a storage unit that we had purchased.

I am really excited to say that my daughter was able to use one of the recipes in that binder tonight.  If I hadn’t taken the time to organize those recipes, we would have never found that recipe that she is making tonight.  I have proudly placed the binder on my recipe book shelf and love knowing that the bag of recipes is no longer. I am a very happy lady!