Recipe Chaos Under Control

Finally finished a chore that I have been putting off for way too long - sorting my recipes.

I pulled out this tub, which was FULL.  And this tub was the improvement!  I started out with the next size larger crammed full of recipes.

It's taken a long time to go through them.  They looked soooo good but I had to say to myself, "Are you seriously planning on making this?"  Some had too many ingredients, some had too many steps. 

And a few I had no idea why I had saved them!

First pile I tackled were my recipes from classes I've taken.  That pink card is my registration for my very first cooking class.  September 1983... bread baking.

I pulled the recipes that I really liked and tossed the rest.  Even with that the recipes I kept almost fill a 3 inch binder!

Lots of tabs so I don't have to hunt too much.

The next notebook has my international recipes.  It still needs some work as I want to organize it by tabs with the various countries of the recipes.

My last notebook has my canning recipes.  I'm going to decorate the other two notebooks like this one, using my photos.

For those recipes that I have clipped and pulled to try, I used two pretty accordion folders.  That was my biggest mess of sorting.  I strictly limited myself to no more than 12 clipped recipes per category.

I threw a lot away.

Here are the results.  My organized recipes on the bottom (the magazine holder is to catch class and clip recipes for putting away).  The top has the cookbooks that I use all the time, plus my recipe box.

Done!