What’s the Best Way to Organize Your Recipe Cards?

If you’re in midlife like I am, chances are you’ve accumulated a lot of recipe cards by now. Whether it’s your grandmother’s prized strawberry pretzel cake or the new blueberry gratin recipe you pulled from the pages of your favorite magazine, developing a way to organize them now can save you hours of searching later.

The best way to organize your recipe cards is to find a system that works well for you. Handwriting each one and storing in a recipe index is a common method, but this can be very time consuming to do. Keeping an electronic recipe file takes time to prep but can be highly beneficial when searching by ingredients. The drawback, of course, is if you don’t have access to your tablet or computer. You’ll likely also wind up printing the recipes over and over again for reference in the kitchen.

Before You Get Started

Collecting and organizing recipe cards requires finding a system that works for you. You may wonder, though, if all of these recipes are necessary. We now have a greater variety of foods available to us and often find economical foods that will satisfy our hunger as well as our budget, without the need for a recipe. You might just turn to the internet each time you need a recipe. Even still, you may find that you use the same recipe over and over and it would be best to have a printed copy quickly available.

It’s quite possible, if you are a foodie, that you’ve amassed a huge stack of recipes. If you’re reading this article, chances are, you are, and this is the pile we need to conquer. Before you decide on a system, take time to sort through your recipes.

Create piles of your recipes to include categories like:

• family favorites
• heirloom recipes
• holiday specific recipes
• recipes you clipped and stored for inspiration

If you love to cook, the inspiration pile is the one you’ll need to tackle! How many recipes do you need for bread pudding exactly when you only make it once a year? Decide up front which recipe from the inspiration pile still “speaks” to you and your current culinary tastes and needs. Discard the rest.

For heirloom recipes, sort through and decide which recipes your family still actively enjoys or has sentimental value to you. Whatever does not meet that criteria, see if someone else in your family might like to be the future keeper of those recipe cards.

The key to successful organizing is to pare down your recipe pile to include only what you will really use.

Create Your Categories

Once you have your recipes sorted into larger groupings, think about sorting them into smaller categories such as breakfast, dinner, lunch and dessert.

Next, find commonalities within those groups, such as bread-based recipes and then sort those recipes even further. Things like every day breads, coffee cakes, and bundt cakes are recipes that you may want to keep together. Bake sale goodies, cupcakes and birthday cakes can go into a file for use. You need to keep your chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, and sugar cookie recipes handy for monthly use, but you can keep all your holiday treats separate.

One recipe file category that is often overlooked is a beverage section. Whether you have instructions for dehydrating fruit juice, making flavored coffees, or whipping up a delicious smoothie, it deserves a category of its own for future reference.

Decide Your System

Now that you have your recipes fully sorted, what stands out to you? Do you mainly have printed pieces of paper from internet searches? Do you predominantly own 3×5 index cards? Are the bulk of your recipes pages from magazines? Or did you find out that the majority of the recipes you use are from the massive pile of cookbooks you own?

If you have paper or pages from magazines, a terrific system to use is to purchase an 8×10 three-ring file binder. You can then get dividers and a box of clear insert sleeves. Place each recipe in a clear insert sleeve, write your categories on the dividers, then file. Viola! You have an instant recipe file!

If you have a mix of paper and index cards, you can also find clear insert sleeves designed for index cards to use in your binder, too.

Have mostly index cards? An index card holder (or two or three) may be the best solution for you.

Do you mainly have recipe books and just a few pages of recipes? Read on…

What if You Have an Abundance of Recipe Books?

Maybe you are a super foodie. Or maybe you inherited all of mom’s recipe books. Maybe, like me, you have more bookshelves than most people and they are over-flowing. Need to join me in recipe hoarders anonymous, anyone?

There’s a quick, practical solution. It may pain you a little, but you can reduce your recipe pile dramatically. If you’re only using one to three recipes in any given book, do you really need the entire book? No. Let it go and donate to your local thrift store or library. Or have a recipe book yard sale!

Determine whether you want to store the hard copies of the recipes in a binder, an index card filing system, or in an electronic format. Before you donate the books, simple copy the recipes you frequently use by hand, by using a photo-copy machine, or by using a scanner for electronic copies. You will not be infringing any copyright laws if it’s solely for personal use.

If there are other recipes in the book that you really want to try, copy those too.

Should I Create a Recipe Book?

If you have a set number of family favorite recipes and/or heirloom recipes you really want to save for future generations, creating your own family recipe book might be a wonderful route to go. There are plenty of software programs as simple as Microsoft Word or more complex like Canva available for you to create a simple or more deluxe recipe book. You can then have them printed and professionally bound or you can print the pages yourself and spiral bind or store in a regular three-ring binder. It can look as elaborate or simple as you desire.

You don’t even have to create it electronically. You can simply photocopy all of the recipes and store them in a three-ring binder with handwritten dividers and maybe a few personal notes.

Whatever style you decide on, be sure to attribute where each recipe came from. Add in a few notes about how or when your family obtained the recipe and when it was commonly use. Future generations will truly appreciate having a ready-made book for their use. They’ll also enjoy knowing a little bit of the history of each recipe.

Where do I Find Good Recipes?

If you are just starting out with collecting recipes, it can be really difficult to navigate the internet for them as there are so many! And not all good recipes make it to the top of the recipe search pile. Sometimes, a website that has great rankings may not have very good recipes at all.

The best place to begin your search is within your own circle of friends and family. Tell them you are looking for new recipe inspiration and ask them to give you some of their favorites. Most people love sharing.

Next, you can access your internet circle of friends. Go to a local or friend group and ask for recipes. If you don’t want to get bombarded with a zillion categories at once, ask for specifics like “what’s your favorite breakfast recipe using locally sourced ingredients?” or “who has favorite holiday dessert recipes you might be willing to share with me?”

Brand name companies also furnish many wonderful recipes for their products for use. Love cheddar cheese? Check out your favorite brand name cheese website for recipe inspiration.

You can also head to the library and check out recipe books. Flip through them, see what inspires you, and copy the recipe down to try. If you have a favorite celebrity or local chef who has a cookbook, purchase a copy to try some of their recipes.

Should I Add New Recipes?

You’ve pared your recipe down, donated your cookbooks, and still, something feels like it’s missing from your recipe file.

It could be instructional recipes. Such as, turkey cooking tips. There are many different ways of preparing a turkey and maybe it will benefit you to have your preferred prep in your recipe file.

It may be that you have a need for alternative recipes. For example, some holiday ingredients may be scarce or price. Having a section with alternate holiday recipes is very convenient. When you cannot find enough pecans to make a pie, you will then have a recipe to make a walnut pie.

Sometimes recipes turn out better if you match a recipe to the origin of the product. Grouper fish is a prime example of this. Grouper is a Mediterranean fish and if you use a Mediterranean style cooking method, you will have a delicious fish. Maybe your recipe pile would benefit from having a few recipes that are specific to your favorite ingredients.

A lot of people like to prepare one vegetarian meal each week.  A vegetarian breakfast is good for you but you don’t have to limit yourself to omelets and cereals. Take time to research and include recipes in your collection that will help you add variety to your meal choices.

Whatever route you choose to take, investing a few hours up front to sort your recipe collection will give you more time enjoying your favorite dishes later!