Cookbook Clutter

This week had two tasks; one was to create an area in your home for recycling. The second is to start sorting out your cookbook /recipe book clutter.

Now if you are like me, and enjoy cooking or even if you just enjoy cookbooks, you probably have a ton of them, or you might have a stack of recipes written on slips of paper or printed off the internet or cut out of magazines. I have a quite a few on an app called Evernote, which helps you store and collate digital data.

Hopefully they are in the kitchen or at least near your kitchen where they will actually be used!

You now need to create a filing system for all your recipes.

ABC of Cooking

If you have a recipe book that you are keeping only for one recipe, then copy the recipe and get rid of the book, it is clutter!

If you have a recipe book that you bought because you like the chef, but have never used it, its clutter.

Your loose pages need to be filed or written down somewhere, and this is where the ABC comes in. A file with alphabetical separators or index book is needed. You need to decide how you are going to categorise your recipes. Are you going to put them in by main ingredient, this is the most common one, or are you going more detailed and choosing something like, number of ingredients and then the main ingredient, or go by how long it takes to cook?

I go with easy, Meat, Chicken, Fish, Vegetable, Soup and Dessert.

Once you have decided how you are going to keep your recipes, you need to decide what to do with the left overs.

Find an area where you can put the cookbooks that you want to donate to charity, or give to a friend who might like them (ask first, they may also not want more clutter).

If you would like to get your house back into a home, why not join the conversation at https://www.facebook.com/groups/gettingsorted/