Recipe organization often feels like it takes eons. Apps and tools made for this kind of thing can be easily accessed from practically any device, yet many home cooks still find their recipes spread out between notecards, cookbooks, websites, apps, and random sheets of paper. Despite this abundance of options for organizing recipes, many people feel they don’t have time to put all their recipes in one place and organize them. So, the question is simple: how do you organize your recipes without wasting your whole day?
If you’re in no rush to get all your recipes sorted, then one of the easiest methods is to add a recipe every time you cook it. Before you cook dinner or bake a treat, spend 30 seconds adding the recipe to a management app, like Folio, or to a binder. Do this every time you make dinner, breakfast, dessert, or any snack that involves a treasured recipe you don’t keep in your head. By the end of the month, your most common recipes will be added, and by the end of a year, you’ll have pretty much all of them organized and ready to go.
A faster option involves going category by category. On the first day, you separate your recipes into how you want to sort them. Then, you spend a day on each category, adding all the recipes in the category to your organizer of choice. Maybe you want to organize by meal, by type of food, or even by time of year. Many recipe apps have default categories that you could use. This is a great in-between option, taking about one hour each day.
My personal favorite, however, is taking an afternoon to sit down and sort all of them at once. It can be relaxing and even fun if you like that sort of thing. After a couple of hours, you won’t have to think twice about finding a recipe.
Most of the world’s home cooks know that they would benefit from sorting their recipes, but the time it takes has always been a barrier. Now you can organize all your beloved recipes easily, based on your schedule. Once you’ve picked a method and you finally have them all sorted, you can answer the more difficult question: what to make!
Happy cooking,
Colin