Weekly Challenge: Recipe Binder (and free printables!)

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Today is the start of our first Weekly Challenge (and my first Linky Party!)  

I have a few projects around the house that I want need to get done.  I love to be organized, but it's definitely something that I have to work at each and every day!  My first challenge is to create a recipe binder.  I've had one for years, but it tends to get abused.  When I started my baking craze, I had to separate my binders into two: one for meals and one for desserts.  I love to collect recipes from the internet and from magazines, but they needed a place to go where they could be used and enjoyed.  

Here is my finished product:

I put each of my recipes in a page protector, so they won't get ruined if something splatters on the recipe while I'm cooking.  I've had a really hard time with index tabs, though.  The page protectors and dividers are the same width…so you can't see the tabs.  It always drove me crazy!!  So I decided to make my own tabs and I'll share them with you!

Ready to get started?  

Gather your supplies:

*binder
*page protectors
*tabs (or printable tabs below)
*clear packing tape
*recipes

Gather your recipes and organize them by category.  Here are my categories so you can get an idea:

breakfast, bread/muffins, starters/dips, soups, salads, sides, pasta, beef, pork, poultry, vegetarian, other, beverages, sandwiches, icings, cookies, cakes, pumpkin, apple, cupcake, and references.

I left out seafood…did you notice?  Much to my husband's chagrin, I do not eat seafood.  Actually, he doesn't care that I don't eat it, but the result is that I don't cook it.  And THAT'S what makes him sad!

I actually have 2 binders - 1 for meals and another for desserts.  I love baking and have lots of recipes.  (My husband loves to cook and in a perfect world he'd be home to cook dinner and I'd make dessert!  Alas, we're lucky if he's even home lately to eat dinner, so we'll just take what we can get for now!)  You can see that my binders weren't exactly organized!

If you want to use my tabs, cut them out and pull aside enough page protectors for each tab.  

Using the packing tape, attach one tab to each sheet.  I spaced them out evenly, using 5 in a row.

I also use a free recipe reference printable from i{heart}organizing.  See it in the photo above?  I have a pretty big collection of cookbooks and have trouble remembering which recipe came from which book.  On this page you can list them all as a reference so you're not helplessly searching through each of your cookbooks.

Now, doesn't this look better?

Free printable tabs can be found HERE.  I included a few blank tabs too, in case there's a category you'd like that I didn't use.  

*UPDATED: I also have a 2012-13 FREE calendar available!  Read about organizing my family binder HERE.

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