Recipe Keeper

When it's time to make up my menu plan for the week (and the accompanying grocery list) I don't usually feel very inspired. I enjoy cooking and trying new recipes but I don't like how long it can take to come up with six meal ideas (I reserve one dinner a week for leftovers. My mother-in-love calls this "best of the week" and I've chosen to adopt the term.) while I'm also trying to mix things up a bit week after week. I sometimes find myself trying to remember our family favourites off the top of my head in an effort to avoid searching for them. This is because they're located in three different places: online, in my cookbooks and the 1" binder where I store my printouts and hand written recipes.

Enter this beautiful recipe keeper my mom gave me a while ago.

Knowing it would take a ridiculous amount of time to transfer all of my recipes into it at once, I've slowly been writing out my favourite recipes from the binder I was just talking about onto the fresh new pages of my recipe keeper. As part of the process I went through the entire binder and got rid of the recipes I don't use or know I'm never actually going to try. This cut the number of recipes I had in half. I've been really enjoying how uniform all of my recipes look written on the same pages all the way through, and the fact that it's divided into sections like this:



So today when it was time to meal plan I had a great idea!

I can use this little binder to keep all of my favourite meal ideas in one place. All of my favourite recipes from those 3 different locations! That way, when it's time to sit down and meal plan I can pull out my binder and simply look through it. It will be so much easier to mix it up if I have a large group of favourites to pick from instead of trying to remember them on my own. This makes it seem so much less intimidating to me to try and come up with 1 or 2 new recipes each week just for fun. As new recipes become true favourites they will be added to the binder. If it gets full enough that it becomes too time consuming just to flip through it I'll simply make a reference sheet at the front of the binder listing all of the meals in the binder so I can give it a quick scan.

I imagine this is not a new concept for many, and it's a pretty simple one - but I'm really excited about it! I can hardly wait to get all of my favourites in one place!