How to Organize Recipes to Facilitate Meal Planning

I recently the members of my Facebook Group how they organize their recipes. A couple of responses stood out.

One friend has an elaborate system using a variety of binders. She’ll even photocopy recipes out of recipe books she owns so that it can be placed in the binder with the other favorite dishes

Another, writes down the family favorites on the inside of her cabinets!

This episode is a good one if you’re looking to organize your favorite recipes so that you can streamline meal planning.

Transcript of the Episode

Hi, friends, it's Andrea here with another episode of adventures and feeding my fan. 00:05 If you're like me, Andrea Heyman 00:06 there have been points in my life where I have had recipes literally all over the place. And no organization whatsoever. I mean, really like I would make a recipe, I would cut something out, put it in a little file folder, and then obviously I couldn't find anything. So that was no good for me. So I went through and totally overhauled my system. And this is a question I got on my Facebook group by one of the members there. And they were just asking for tips on how to organize their recipes. So we're gonna give you a few options today. But first, if you're listening to this, on the day, it's released on April 28, you've got a few more hours to register for the pathway to lasting habits, time is really short, because we were going to start tonight at 6pm Eastern time. But you can definitely still get in there if you act fast. adventures and feeding my fam is a weekly podcast discussing the challenges and fun around feeding your family healthy meals. I'm Andrea Heyman, and I've been a registered dietician for over 25 years. So I know the importance of good nutrition. But I'm also a mom of three so I understand the challenges and tumor that come along with trying to make this happen. In this podcast, I'll share my tips, tricks and menus, but also share the stories and food prep failures that come along the way to interview guests, we'll discuss family food traditions, how to strengthen bonds around the family table, as well as their favorite family recipes. There isn't one right way to feed your family. But there are countless stories, you can take bits and pieces and learn from all of them. So I did get this question from one of my facebook group members. But then I also followed up and asked in the Facebook group and got a lot of feedback. And it looks like some people have some really creative ways and fun ways to keep track of all of their recipes. So probably the most common is just to take loose written recipes, and put them in a journal or binder. This is pretty much what I do. I've got one of those photo album kind of Yeah, I guess it is a photo album. And then there are slots where you can slide your photos in. Well, I just use that input recipes in there. But I've got sections for it. So the first section is salads, and then entrees and then soups, so on and so forth. One of my friends from college that she said she's got like a whole series of binders and almost like a different binder for every course of the meal. And she'll even photocopy recipes out of her cookbooks, and then put it in her binder so that she has everything she wants to keep more than one place and then doesn't have to go searching and remember like which cookbook that was found in. Another friend of mine said she has old kitchen cabinets, and she literally writes her favorite recipes down on the inside of her kitchen cupboards. I thought that was a lot of fun. And obviously I know this woman, so it sounded exactly like something she would do, because she's kind of whimsical. A similar version is to add your recipes to an accordion, or expanding file folder. So it's a similar concept as the journal or a binder, but just a different format. And of course, there's the old standard of using a file box or a file drawer, and using the tried and true recipe cards, but I personally don't like to take the time to handwrite things and my handwriting over time because I don't write that much. I type on a computer but I don't write that much. So my handwriting has gotten pretty poor. So I really pretty much put it all into printed form and put it into my binder, or my photo album I should say. One of my friends told me and this was on the podcast episode number two, I believe it was and she told me that she created a whole scrapbook of family recipes. So all the classic things that everyone in their family when they would come together, they would put their recipes, they you know all the classic things that everybody would make and bring. So now that even some family Members have passed on. They have got these, like these incredible family recipes that they all still make. And they have these great memories of that particular family member. And I think that's such a lovely, lovely memory and heirloom that they will have. And I asked her if she was going to add, have heard her own children and recipes. And she said she hadn't thought about that yet, because her kids or her oldest is really just a freshman in college right now. They're not really at that stage where their kids are creating their own routines and their own kind of memories and their own households. But she liked the idea. So I suspect they will have like a Volume Two of favorite family recipes. If you're not a paper kind of person, there are digital ways and digital apps that you can use to organize your recipes. And this, I will be perfectly honest, I do not have experience with this because I don't use it myself. But there is quite a list of organizers out there. And they have different features, although they all seem to have some similar features. So a lot of times you can with these digital organizers, you can paste the your URL of a recipe page from a website that you want. And you can clip the recipe, you can also write your recipe manually in by putting it into a form and then you have it in the app. And you can also copy and paste the recipe from a text document. And then it gets saved into that digital app. And of course scanning and uploading a photo of a recipe cards. So some of those options apparently are a little bit different a little bit faster than others. So it seems like from the research, I did the app, David oven seem to be pretty popular. And some of the nice features are that you can access it on the web, a laptop or a smartphone. So and of course digital, you're not using all that paper and taking up space. And that way, they will calculate the different portions, the different amounts of ingredients that you need for different portions. So that is a pretty darn nice feature, I would say. And then it will also create shopping lists. So I'm actually not i'm not affiliated with big oven, this is just the research that I did. And then it also has tons and tons of recipes that you can access of their own. And then folks save it, you can enter in the ingredients that you've got available. And then it will search its database and find appropriate recipes for that. So another app is Chef tap. And I think it's got similar features. But from what I read, the reviews aren't quite as convincing as the big of an app. So this is something that I'm definitely going to check out. And I hope this episode was helpful. These are just a few ideas to help organize your recipes. And I think I'm definitely going to be going in the digital route. I'll keep my recipe books, but all those photo albums that I have of the miscellaneous recipes that I've tucked in there over the years, I will probably upload into an app so I will I will keep you posted and let you know how I find it once I begin using it. I hope this was helpful for you. If you like this episode and want to share with a friend or a family member, please do. Until next time, take care