How to Organize Your Recipes - Part 2

In my last post, I listed out ways that I make lists (!) to keep track of what I’ve cooked and baked and how to search for recipes.  Here are a few more helpful tips to keep your family recipes and memories saved in one place, and how I organized my Pinterest and Food Network app recipes.  

The way I keep my recipes that are on Pinterest and the Food Network app organized is to save them onto boards by the category of the food.  On Pinterest, I got super into it and broke them into 30 (!) categories.  I label them all as “Recipes - (Category)” that way when they are sorted alphabetically, all the recipe boards stay together.  After some pinning onto my dessert board, it was difficult to find what I wanted as there were so many types of desserts since this is my favorite category of foods.  So now I have 7 categories for desserts broken into further categories such as cookies, pies and tarts, and frozen, for example.  This makes it easier to search and makes each board smaller, and therefore, a little more manageable when scrolling through it to find what you are looking for. Come visit my Pinterest page to see for yourself how it’s all organized.  For the Food Network app, I only have 7 categories, but my “Mains” board has almost 1,000 recipes saved to it making it hard to find what I want.  I think this might be a future project to make more refined categories for my boards so it’s easier to find what I’m looking for.  See, I told you I like organizing! 

Here are some of my boards on Pinterest

They are all named by “Recipes - (Category)” to keep them all together when they are sorted alphabetically.

The last way I organize my recipes is to write my family recipes into the “Our Family Recipes” book so they are all together and written out step by step.  This way they won’t be on loose notecards that could become lost, ripped, or faded over time.  My mom gave me a good idea to have that family member or friend write the recipe so I would have it in their handwriting much like the index cards that most of them have for their passed-down recipes.  I just ordered a book called “Menus: A Book for Your Meals and Memories” from Jacques Pepin.  He is a super famous French chef who I found out from the Sporkful podcast would document the menus and guest lists when he entertained others at his house.  So he made a book for others to do the same with illustrations to jazz it up.  I like documenting my fun plans on my Google Calendar, and I thought it would be so neat to look back at who I had over to my house and what I made for them.  Just another way to document and, ultimately, remember the great food I’ve made and those I shared it with.  

What are some ways that you keep track of your passed-down family recipes?