The Town Herald

The e-zine about Elftowners, by Elftowners, for Elftowners.

Recipe Cards - Organising Your Recipes

By [hanhepi]



Maybe you are already super organized. Maybe all your great recipes are in special files on your computer. Congratulations! But maybe you are like me and you have a shit load of recipe books, recipe clippings from magazines, and scraps of paper with recipes scrawled in shorthand all over them shoved in the recipe books. Maybe some of those recipes are important to you... Grandma's fudge recipe, or the one for her biscuits. Maybe we should all be thinking about putting most of them in one handy spot, condense things a bit while we are at it (Why on earth do I need a recipe for squash casserole? I don't even almost like squash! Eww).

I had this urge a few years ago... I go through these spells of needing to organize all the junk I have laying around every so often. This is the story of how I got all my recipes organized.

So I took a little trip down to the store, specifically looking for a recipe box just like Grandma had all of hers in. Nothing fancy... just a nice little box, sturdy enough ( hers was metal and had ghastly orange and yellow daisy-like flowers from the 1960's on it) for years of storing and referencing the recipes in it. I wanted something that would look good next to my cookbooks on the shelf in the kitchen. Granted, I went to a dollar store looking for this thing, so I was probably doomed from the beginning. After looking through all the aisles with no luck, I was over in the brick-a-brack section and I found the cutest little wooden box... it looked like a treasure chest. It was lined with a fake, short pile, velvety cloth. It looked like it would hold a 3x5 index card perfectly. Cute, right? I bought it and happily went home, eager to start this project. I get home, and proudly show my husband what I found for the recipes. He agrees that it is a really cool little box. I take my box out of its bag, get all the recipe books off of the shelf, pull all of my scraps of paper, magazine clippings, and those annoying recipes printed on the wrappers of different foods out of the books. I make 2 piles: recipes I know I want, and ones I might someday use. I search my entire house through, and cannot find a single index card. So I shove all of the scraps in the box, and put everything away.

Several months pass, and I finally remember to buy index cards. “Now I can organize my recipes!” I squeal with glee in the store. Yes, I did get weird looks. Again, I head home, gather all the sources and create little piles of recipes. Then I find a pen and start deciphering the chicken scratches scrawled on those scraps of paper. I got maybe six recipes transferred in my neatest handwriting on to the index cards and got bored, so I started putting all of my stuff away. I get the index cards in the box (it wasn't quite as big as I thought, the index cards bow a little, but that's okay!) I go to close the cool little hasp that keeps the lid closed on my nifty little recipe box, and the stupid clasp breaks in my hand. Now this cheap piece of crap won't stay closed...the lid flops open every time I touch it. “This is not going to work,” I say to my husband. His response, of course, is to laugh, and loudly. There may also have been pointing, with the hand that was not clutching his ribs.

It had probably been a year since that happened, and I was at Wal-mart buying plastic boxes to organize my makeup and other crap cluttering up my bathroom, and find a little plastic box for holding -get this- index cards! I think angels might have sung for me at that moment. Sure, it wasn't pretty like Grandma's recipe box, but it was big enough to hold lots of index cards, and spiders can't build webs in it (okay, so I don't use recipes an awful lot) because the lid seals. I was back in business.

Now I had a box and I could finally get organized. I went home and yet again gathered all of my crap into one place (middle of the living room floor).
Here's what should have happened: I should have sat there, rewriting all those ancient, messily scrawled recipes in my absolute neatest handwriting until every ugly scrap of paper could have been thrown away. Maybe pasted the magazine clippings to index cards of their own, since they are already neatly written, and most have pictures too. Then I should have neatly placed the recipe books back on their shelf in the kitchen and put the boxful of neatly written recipes on that shelf too.

By now though, you've probably figured out that it didn't quite go that way for me. Here's what really happened: I got distracted. A few hours after starting, I was watching TV more than I was copying, so I decided to put everything away. So into the new box went the recipes I had neatly written on index cards, most of the scrawled recipes yet to be copied, all of the magazine clippings and all of the cut-outs from the wrappers. I did remember to put the unused index cards in the box so I could find them again the next time I decided to try this project.

It's been over a year, and all I do is add more clippings to the box. But hey, at least they aren't just shoved in the books anymore, right? Now, if you'll excuse me, I probably should go ahead and put my makeup and other random crap in the bathroom in those plastic boxes I bought for them over a year ago. Where did I put those boxes....?

Free Downloadable Recipe Cards!

Made to fit three x cards to one x A4 size page of standard printer paper, although you can print these out onto thicker card, or hi-res paper stock

Instructions:

1. Clck the "Download" link and save the files to your computer.

2. Open the files in your image editing or PDF viewing software of choice, and select "print".
Note: If you want to print lots of copies of only one pattern, you will need to use your image editing software to copy that card, and replace the other two unwanted cards.

3. Decide what type of paper you're going to print the cards onto; some printers have special options to select if you are going to use a different type of paper, so be sure to do this if necessary.

4. Using scissors or a craft knife and ruler, cut your three cards apart. You can now use them as individual recipe cards, to stick in a folder, scrapbook, storage box, or simply to keep handy around the kitchen!

5. Simply fill in the Recipe Name, Ingredients, and Method.

             




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