Organizing Grandma’s Recipes

Many people have recipes that have been passed down from generation to generation. Typically, they come to us on index cards, worn pieces of paper, backs of envelopes and/or other creative formats of yesteryear. Knowing how to organize these recipes will make a huge difference in making these treasured recipes user-friendly.  If you are looking for clutter solutions in the kitchen, organizing recipe cards is a good way to start.

Traditional recipe boxes are not accommodating. If the recipe does not fit on a tiny card, folding the paper and stuffing it into the box is not a good solution. Old, hand-written recipes that are on paper can be easily torn, edges frayed or have food spilled on them. The old file box does not cut the mustard anymore. 

There are several solutions to the recipe problem. A photo album is one method. Photo albums come in a variety of sizes, and can meet the needs of nearly any paper size. If most of your recipes are on file cards, a small album will do. Photo albums have a plastic film to cover the recipe to help protect the paper. 

A three-ring binder is another good choice. You can get plastic page protectors to keep the pages safe. The recipe simply slides down into the protector.

By using either of these two methods, you can add either old, hand-written recipes or printed-out pages from the computer. If you only use 1-2 recipes from a cookbook, think about copying those recipes and donating the cookbook to make additional room in your kitchen. The recipes in the page protectors can be easily removed to make notes, corrections or additions.

While creating organizing solutions for your best recipes, you can make this chore into a family activity. Everyone can sit around the table and talk about which dishes are their favorites, which ones they do not like or new meals they would like to try. Printing out or writing the recipes on colored paper, even with different colored or metallic inks can add flair to your recipe collection. By adding tabs, you can divide the recipes into sections either by the type of food, country of origin or whatever method makes the most sense to you.

Of course, in the digital age, people like to store all of their records on the computer. There are a few ways to do that. You can scan or take photos of all of your handwritten or typed recipes. Even favorites from books can be scanned. They can be saved into a folder named “Recipes” on your computer. Use the name of the dish as the name of the file so you can sort them alphabetically.  

It is easy to take a screen shot of a web page with your recipe on a website. You can then save it as a .jpg file and store it on the computer with your other recipes. If you decide to make the item, print out the page if you need it or just refer to the page on the screen to avoid wasting paper.

Simply bookmarking the page where you got a recipe does not always work. Sometimes you cannot remember where you saved the page, or what page had which recipe. You have to go through each bookmarked site to find the page you want. A solution to this problem is to save the bookmark with a name you choose. Then make a bookmark folder called “Recipes” and store them in that folder.

Whether you like the old-school book or the new-fangled computer folder, organizing and saving your recipes will be sure to keep the family’s favorites right where you need them. Check back with us for more professional organizer tips.