Works for Me Wednesday!!!

How many of you have tons of recipes collected??? Some passed down by family, or torn out of magazines or something you find on the internet and just jot down on some paper?

Well I have all those and more. I LOVE cooking so over the years I've collected numerous recipes and they are literally everywhere. It's hard to find just the right one to make and I honestly don't feel like going through piles and piles just to find that special one.

My WFMW tip today is about organizing my recipes.

This weekend I had a couple of free hours, so I took out all my hundreds of recipes, sat down at the kitchen table and literally went through all of them. I separated the ones I wanted to keep from the ones I no longer want. Then I went out and purchased a three ring binder, like the one pictured below and I also got some of those sticky photo pages like you find in photo albums.
Oh I did buy the binder that has those clear plastic sleeves on the cover. I made a cute graphic, printed it out and stuck it in there.

I arranged the recipes on the pages, which makes it easy to remove if I want to use it, or make a copy for a friend or something.

I have recipes that are handwritten by family members, especially my greatgrandmother and grandmother, so for those, I just use a clear plastic sleeve at the back of the binder, this way I still have them handy but don't have to worry about tearing them.

I also used the plastic sleeves to divide the recipes into sections. I made graphics using my Paintshop Pro for things such as Appetizers, Salads, Poultry, Meat etc.....
It looks a LOT better than having my recipes in boxes or in a drawer somewhere, and since everything is organized everytime I find a new recipe, it will be much easier to put it in the right section :)

Definitely worked for me, hope it works for many others. As always, for a list of other WFMW partipants, head on over to Shannon's blog, "Rocks in my Dryers".