It’s Spring!  Time to get after cleaning and organizing.  This is the first post in the category of organizing your kitchen and your home.  Not everyone is inclined to be organized.  For many of us, it’s a learned habit.  But there are great benefits to putting in the work up front so that the work to come can be more productive.  In fact, people who have clean workspaces are 95% more productive.  Just leaving your desk messy (or kitchen, or living room, or …) increases your risk for feeling tired or depressed.  The goal is to start the day clean and end the day clean.

According to business owner & entrepreneur Codie Sanchez:

“You want to change your life, start with cleaning your room.

You want to get rich, start with cleaning up your finances.

You want to change your body, start with cleaning up your diet.

Cleaning = underrated hack.”

For many of us, our kitchen is our workspace, and our home is our workspace.  So, let’s kick this off with recipe organization.  Collecting recipes that you enjoy making is a critical step to being able to consistently meal plan.  Meal planning will save you time, money, and mind share.  We’ll talk about this in upcoming posts, but let’s start with building a catalog of go-to recipes.  Cookbooks are awesome – I have a vast collection – but they’re not easy to thumb through when you’re looking for meal ideas.  You need a recipe binder, a box, or a catalog of some sort that you can manage and flip through when you need ideas.

What I’ve found to work well is a regular 1” 3-ring binder.  You’ll eventually outgrow the 1” binder and could go with a 2” or even 3”, but I find those too big and cumbersome.  I outgrew my first 1” binder a couple of months back and just added another instead of sizing up.  I split the soup, salads, and mains into their own binder and kept the remaining categories in the original.

Here are some hacks I’d recommend as you start to pull together a catalog of your tried-and-true recipes:

• Create a table of contents, categorizing food into a handful of major categories (appetizers, salads, soups, mains, desserts, beverages, etc.).  This serves two critical purposes:
  • Makes it easy to quickly scan for meal planning (vs. flipping through one by one)
  • Helps you quickly locate the recipe you’re looking for
• Only add recipes to your catalog that you’d tried and approved; look for a binder that has a pocket inside the cover for those recipes you haven’t yet made, but would like to try
• Make notes on the recipes where you’ve made variations or would recommend a variation for the next time
• Find a couple of blogs that you love for sourcing recipes – when you need to collect more, it’s easier to go to a trusted source that you like versus randomly searching the internet
• Continually be on the lookout for new recipes to add to your trial pocket – the more you have, the easier meal planning will be
• Create two Word document templates that you can use over and over:
  • one for recipes
  • one for your table of contents that you can use consistently
• Type out any recipes that you’ve found in cookbooks, got handed down from family, or created on your own that you want to remember and have at our fingertips when meal planning

I’d love to hear your processes and how you stay organized with recipes.  Share your hacks in the comments below!