Sunday, September 21, 2008

don't call me Martha

Martha Stewart I am not.

I'm not the most organized person out there, which is no surprise, judging by the looks of my apartment, which, obviously, you can't see at the moment!

I do, however, love to cook. I don't as often as I'd like, due to the extremly small size of my kitchen! Despite that, I have a lot of cookbooks. Like, more then 150, in all seriousness. I have this kitchen hutch that my microwave sits on and the top part is shelves. It's full. I also have them on the kitchen cart next to the fridge, and then more on top of the fridge.

I have a lot of cookbooks. Remind me sometime to post a picture.

I do also have a few recipe boxes, where I copy down recipes onto cute cards and organize them according to food type (breads, appetizer, poultry, etc).

Even though I have enough cookbooks where I could probably cook a different recipe every night for the next five years without repeating, I buy cooking magazines. I subscribe to Racheal Ray, Bon Appetite and Food and Wine, and many months, I buy a few more, including Olive, a British cooking magazine that I picked up at Heathrow last year and now spend $10 a month for the imported copy at Barnes and Noble.

As you can imagine, these magazines are piling up. I'm debating what to do with them. I obviously can't keep them all, not at this rate.

What would you do? Rip out the recipes you like and organize them into some sort of binder? Copy the recipes you like onto cute recipe cards for aforementioned recipe boxes?

How do you organize your recipes?

7 comments:

Janssen said...

Wow, 150!? I'm impressed!

And you could always hand them out to the Internet - I'm happy to volunteer myself if needed :)

Anonymous said...

If i were you i'd rip out the pages you want to keep and put them in a binder. That way you can put them together by category and keep only the ones you love.

Lacey Bean said...

I have a binder that I keep all my recipes in, sorted by type of food (meat, cookies, desserts, sides, etc), and then I have little stickers on the ones that I've tried and deemed successful.

For your magazines, since you have so many, I would rip the ones you like out, and get a binder for them, instead of copying them onto cards. It's fun when you're looking for a recipe and you come across an old magazine/newspaper article with it.

Sarah said...

That's a LOT of cookbooks! Since I find most of my recipes online, I just cut and paste them, email them to myself with the name of the recipe in the subject line, then tag them with "Recipes." Paperless works for me.

Anonymous said...

I too love cookbooks and food magazines. When I see a recipe I like I cut it out and put it into a photo album (the old kind that has the clear layer over the sticky pages) and then separate the photo album into sections so I can easily find what I am looking for. When I am ready to make something I can pull the page I need out of the album, since it is backed in cardboard it stands up and the plastic overlay is great for easy clean up if I splash food as I cook away.

Jess said...

In a gorgeous recipe box, as of yesterday! Also, I can't believe how many recipes you sent me. THANK YOU!

Katelin said...

i really wish i was a more avid cooker, i'm hoping that changes soon as i get more settled into my apartment with matt.