Weekend Cooking: Getting Organized for a New Year

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Merry Christmas! Thanks to everyone who has helped make Weekend Cooking so much fun over the last year. This is my 62nd Weekend Cooking post.

I don't know about you, but I get a ton of food magazines. I subscribe to several titles and I pick up others at the grocery store or bookstore when something on the cover catches my eye. Unfortunately, magazines can quickly take over my house. The good news is that one of my favorite winter projects is to organize my recipes.

The first step is to tackle the pile of magazines, the bulk of which are food or wine related. Please tell me that I'm not the only one with a stack like this.

While I'm going though the issues, I rip out any recipes or articles that I think I may want to save. I'm not very discriminating at this stage, and I usually end up with a rather intimidating mountain of paper.

Once the magazines themselves have been ransacked and set out for recycling, I go through the recipes more carefully, saving only the ones I might really make and deleting the duplicates. Then it's time for organizing.

These days, I use small notebooks. I've had many systems over the years but the notebook rings and paper punch I bought from Levenger have allowed me to create my own cookbooks of a variety of thicknesses. They are also very easy to organize and open flat.

The system can be costly, so I use a variety of paper and dividers (some leftover from various day planners I tried in the past) that I convert to the Circa system with a special paper punch. I also have collected my supplies over several years, so I didn't make one huge purchase.

During the January nights when I add new recipes to my notebooks, I also take some time to look through the old ones, throwing out any that no longer appeal to me. Because I glue only one recipe to each page, it's easy to get rid of individual recipes and to re-categorize when the mood hits. I also keep one larger three-ring binder I use for saving entire magazine articles.

The only other system I use (not very faithfully) is Master Cook, a software program. I guess I'm just a bit old-fashioned, however, because I tend use my notebooks more than I use my virtual cookbooks. Wish me luck as I begin my yearly tackle-the-magazines venture.