An Organizing Project

 As The Husband is currently trashing my kitchen making goodies for The Big Game - which he will watch alone, as I have zero interest (although, I admit freely - I DO have an interest in sampling some of those goodies!) - I have taken to the keyboard to tell you about my organizing project for the day.

In the frantic search for the recipe, that I never printed, as mentioned in the last post, it became obvious that my recipe binder needed an intervention.

When I first put the recipe binder together - which I use for those random recipes that I stumble across in the paper, on the internet, from friends etc. it worked great.  Sure it was kind of hodgepodge with tried and true recipes mixed in with those that I wanted to try.  But it was fairly organized.

The Husband who is - how to say this delicately? - less organized than I, had a terrible habit of jotting down recipes/ingredients on any random piece of paper he could find, which he would then tuck into the most random of places...never to be seen again.  And then one day, in the last year or so, he had a "light bulb moment."  He realized that if he put all those papers into ONE spot he would be able to locate them.  

So he began to tuck them into the binder.  Which was fine...until I went on the mad scramble for that cookie recipe, searching through an ungodly amount of loose paper.  That is when it dawned on me...this system was no longer working for me.  Or him.

Today was the day to rectify this issue.

I sorted through ALL the papers and separated our recipes to go into two separate binders - one for him and one for me.  I asked him if he had any preference in how I organized his binder and whether or not he wanted his recipes encased in page protectors.  As expected, he did not care how it was organized and felt there was no need for page protectors.  So I organized it with all my favorites that I could identify, that is, first! 😉

The hilarious thing about his recipes though?  Most had no titles.  They were just lists of ingredients - some of which gave NO indication about what it might be.  When I pointed this out to him he replied, "Give it to me, I'm sure I'll know what it is."  When I handed one over for his identification, he looked at it and said, "I have no idea what in the hell this is." and placed it in the recycle pile.

After his binder was done - I turned to mine...which does have page protectors for those tried and true recipes - which includes the unearthed Best Oatmeal Raisin recipe.  The "want to try one day" pile, I ruthlessly cut out those that I know I will never, ever make never mind how delicious they sound.  Which meant the remaining pile was more manageable.

The tried and true were then organized into the following categories. Cookies, Pies, Cakes, Breads and Random (i.e. candies, appetizers, etc.).

What I did not expect when I waded into this project was that it would take the majority of the day.  But here we are.  It is done and he has a place to put his recipe/ingredients list and I have a place to put my recipes.

Now, I need to challenge myself to try out a couple of those "want to try one day" recipes so they can get added to the tried and true, page protected recipes.