Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Recipe Binder

I've collected recipes for many years, journaling them in notebooks as I find them.  Those notebooks have been immensely helpful to me as I cooked, enabling me to remember how so-and-so made her beans that one time or what Mama does to her enchiladas or what that one biscuit recipe from Mama's cookbook dictated over the phone was.  With the dietary changes we've necessarily had to make over the last year or so, I've had to start collecting recipes with a new zeal, learning an entirely new way to cook.  Basic things like how to make pie crust and pancakes and chocolate cake, from blogs or friends or making them up as I go.  Inspiration, too, for dinnertime: easier to make up as I go without gluten, but without dairy?!  Sometimes I need a jump-start.  Anyway, hand-copying into a notebook, though I enjoy it, is much too time-consuming at this point and hard to search through.  So I have been working on a way to collect and organize my recipes as I go, categorized and alphabetized so I can easily find them when I need to.  Not a new idea in the grand scheme, but exciting to me nonetheless.  Besides, I love my cover and divider pages, and the opportunity to add my favorite quotes!  So, behold, my newest little joy in the kitchen:


  
My favorite little addition... it's my babies!                      
Found on cover envelopes from vintage patterns.             




4 comments:

Christina said...

You make absolutely everything look so beautiful. You are very inspiring...and sweet...I feel like I know you after having read your blog for a year or so. How lovely and blessed your family is.
So you typed it all out and but them in small sheet protectors? Did you make the dividers? And is that just a regular small binder? I also have many recipes hand written in books of all sorts, in many different places, encompassing a large array of dietary changes over the last 20 years since I have begun motherhood.

Christina

Kat said...

Hello, Christina! Thank you for your kind words.
I just recycled a small recipe 3-ring binder, which unfortunately is too narrow for how many recipes I have; I'll have to look for a fatter one. :) I made the dividers...just traced over the ones I found in the binder...used paper left over from Olivia's graduation scrapbooks! The pages are not in sheet protectors, actually--I punched the holes directly into the parchment, hence the hole reinforcement stickers, but I do have a few pages of heavier clear plastic that pop right over the rings so I can move them to cover whichever recipe I'm using...I'm such a splatterer. The recipes I just typed out and formatted in Microsoft Publisher. :)

Deanna Rabe - Creekside Cottage Blog said...

Such a wonderful idea!

I love your babies...cute vintage drawings!

You are a lovely homemaker!

Deanna

blessedmommie said...

Thank you for sharing this! It turned out so nicely. I am also having to make several dietary changes for our family, so you have inspired me. Bless you and your sweet family!