Recipe Organization - Dream or Reality? (or Something More?)

For many years I’ve had a dream.

It’s not an earth-changing dream or even a technically difficult dream. It certainly isn’t an impossible dream.

I’ve dreamed of organizing all my recipes. (Sorry if you were expecting something more exciting, this being the time of year we dedicate much writing and even an entire day of school to the man who had the most famous dream, does make my dream seem sub-par.)

I took a stab at this dream a few years back. I rounded up all the recipes torn from magazines and scattered willy-nilly throughout my house. I trimmed them neatly and taped them to notebook paper (see below, okay, maybe they aren't so neatly trimmed), and put them in notebooks.

The problem was that there were so many and the notebooks quickly became unorganized. Sorting the recipes and putting them in the notebooks in a sensible order became too big of a task. 

Where do you put zucchini bread? Vegetables? Bread? Dessert? The process was rife with too many tiny decisions that left me creating new piles of “Recipes that don’t belong anywhere but I don’t want to lose.”

Other piles grew from there – “Recipes I must try,” “Healthy recipes the kids probably won’t eat,” “Recipes to try for the blog,” and “Recipes to make for book club.”

The notebooks themselves were full to bursting already and any attempts at opening them to insert a new recipe generally led to much bigger disasters when pages slipped out of the overtaxed rings. Sometimes I’d carefully re-order the pages and squeeze them back into the binder but most of the time I just put the loose pages in a new pile called, “To be re-filed.”

The Power of Signs

Signs have power. Did you ever notice that? 

You can tell someone, this is the rule… but until they see it in writing, preferably on a sign, they don’t actually take you seriously. Or maybe that’s just my house. We’re a family of readers (and writers). We like to see things in print.

Some of my kids favorite signs of late include…..

And, even better….

(I place these signs above the toilet at 5:25 AM after the schools auto-robot caller has woken me and crashed my day.)

But I’ve utilized signs to keep the laundry sorted….

The meals eaten….

And the bathroom clean….

My daughter uses a sign to keep out the riff-raff….

Sure, I’m mostly kidding, but sometimes putting up a sign is much better than giving an order. I don’t know about you, but when someone tells me to do something, my inner adolescent soul prickles. I don’t want to do it. I’ll probably do it, but I might wait until you’re not looking or until it feels like it’s my idea.

For better or worse, my kids have inherited many of my own quirks. So I’ve learned they respond better to directions in writing than in nag-form. I’ve begun leaving messages for them on their chore chart.