Organise My Home - Week 5

Week 5:  This might be dangerous................Organise your recipes and cookbooks.

1.  Pull ALL of your cookbooks, recipes, scraps of paper out and sort.  As outlined on the original source of this idea sort them into the following categories:

• Practical: Remembering how to cook the dishes you know your family loves
• Sentimental: Preserving family history with old recipes cards and family favorites passed down through the generations
• Aspirational: Wanting to try new things, to improve or expand your cooking skills, find an even better recipe for something you already make, etc.
• Fantasy: Fun dreaming about cool things you'll never try, but that looks completely awesome

2.  Sort through each of the piles according to the categories above.  Practical should be easy as these are the recipes you use frequently and know your family enjoy (you will no doubt keep most of these).  Sentimental could possibly be moved from the kitchen cupboard/drawers and into your library or glory box for safe keeping.  Aspirational - getting a bit harder.  Do you really need to keep the recipe for a flasher looking lasagne if you already have one that you know your family loves - don't keep it for the sake of keeping it.  Fantasy - Really???  Are you really going to cook that sumptuous looking turkey with 5 accompaniments?  Or do you have a spare 2 hours to cook that devine looking roast.  Be real with these recipes if you really have a desire to cook it then perhaps type it out on your computer and save it there. 

3.  Look at how you store your recipes.  Have all your frequently used cookbooks stored in the kitchen and move all the others to your bookcase.  Purchase a recipe box where you can write out your favourite recipes or those you really want to try and store them in the box.  You may have a large cookbook but only use 2-3 recipes from it.  Write them out and donate/gift someone else the book.

Hope this helps and doesn't become a chore or a break that diet moment (after looking through all those yum recipes!!!!!)

As a side note, perhaps as you are looking through them you could create a weekly meal plan!  Now that is organised!