February 7, 2021

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.

7 comments:

  1. I am so glad you got to make those cookies again, the best oatmeal raisin ones. And that many of the loose pages that went nowhere got tossed. I enjoyed reading about your project as I plow through the Superbowl. I think I'm rooting for the wrong team. :-)

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  2. Since you're done there, can you come over and organize my files? Please???

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  3. As I also recently went through our recipe binder and organized it, I read this with RAPT attention. My husband does the writing of recipes on scraps of paper, too -- I found multiple recipes scribbled out on paper WITHOUT TITLES. A couple, I could figure out what they were... but there was one that was completely mysterious. He allowed me to throw it out because even he had no idea what it was for.

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  4. My recipe book is one of the few things I still have in paper form. I throw them in there if it looks interesting, and eventually come back to them. I have one hanging on the fridge right now, brown butter chicken and brown rice. If I make it and its good it will land in the binder. Or if I gets ick of looking at it, it will land in the binder.

    The only recipe the hubs has is for scrambled eggs. So I think we're good on that front. :)

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  5. Oooh that's a good project! I mostly write them down in a notebook but they aren't organized at all.

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  6. I need to go through my recipe binder and do some organizing as well. I always have such good intentions but things tend to get shoved in with the thought that "I'll file it later" but never do...

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  7. Good for you. It's SO funny that his recipes don't have a name or indication of WHAT they are.

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