The Recipe Notebook

I have been blessed over the years to accumulate many recipes from friends, co-workers and relatives.  Rarely are the recipes ever in the form of a recipe card like the ones that my mother kept.  Rather, they were scribbled on pieces of paper, or shared online, or passed down from a great grandmother on stationary, then copied by grandmother and passed to my mother, and then copied again to be passed to me.  A few years ago, I decided to create a recipe notebook.

[caption id="attachment_1757" align="aligncenter" width="400"] My Great Grandma Violet Rowley-Teunick's War Cake Recipe[/caption]

 

Not only did I like that I could organize the recipes by type, but I could also preserve the handwriting of my friends and family.  I know many women love to make their notebooks pretty, but I really needed mine to be functional.  I wanted something that was going to be durable and I didn't want to worry about spills and messes while I was cooking.

 

 

Supplies you will need:

a heavy duty, three inch, three ring binder
page protectors - begin with a pack of fifty
page dividers
your favorite recipes
Organize your recipes in the way that makes most sense to you.  I keep it simple.  I have a category for:

 

Soups/Stews

Chicken

Beef

Pork

Fish

Veggies

Baking (Cakes, Pies, Cookies, etc...)

Secret Family Recipes

 

I have a friend who decided to organize her book based on who gave her the recipes:

 

Grandma Smith

Great Grandma Taylor

Aunt Christy

Kate

Ellen

Paula

 

My friend has an amazing mind and she can recall who gave her which recipe and she knows right where to look.  But me?  I'd be lost!  So choose a system that works for you.

Once you decide how to organize your recipes, label your page dividers, and begin filling your page protectors with recipes.  Don't skip the page protectors!  We all mean to be careful, but spills and splotches happen!

Keep an extra supply of page protectors on hand.  I usually try a recipe at least twice before I add it to my notebook.  My notebook is only for the recipes I want to keep for regular or future use.  It has a pocket in the front, so I usually keep untried recipes there, and then if we decide we like them, I pop them into a page protector and file it in its proper place.  I try to remember to make a note on the recipe about how well my family liked it and if I needed to make any changes to the ingredients.

I enjoy the order my notebook has brought to my kitchen.  I no longer have to rummage through a tiny box for folded, oil stained scraps of paper.  Nor do I have to guess where I last left a recipe, "Did I leave it in the kitchen drawer? Or did I fold it up in the cookbook?" - while my hungry family waits for supper.  A little bit of organization now prevents much frustration later.  Who knew a notebook could help us be happier homemakers?

 

Many blessings,