Tidy Tip Tuesday - Cookbook Crimes Undone

Do you use a cookbook while you're in the kitchen cooking? If so, have you ruined your favorites doing so? I have. The photo is of the oldest cookbook I own and it is so tattered and worn that I dare not take it into the kitchen for one more round lest it disintegrate into a puff of dust right in front of me.

I hope I am not alone in this crime of cookbook crunching. If I am alone - if all of you out there in Blog Land have neat, clean cookbooks then this post will be in vain. But just in case you suffer from the same malady, I would like to share with you a tip about how to keep your cookbooks tidy and clean.

About four years ago I wised up to this problem (yeah, I'm slow). First of all, I own quite a few cookbooks and it was a challenge to remember which recipe came from which book when I needed it. That together with being the Cookbook Killer made it necessary for me to come up with a different plan. So this is what I did:

1. I photo copied all the recipes I used on a consistent basis.

2. I arranged all the copies in alphabetical order.

3. I put the recipe pages into plastic protector sleeves, 2 to a sleeve with one recipe on the front and one on the back, keeping them in alphabetical order. But I also left some sleeves with just one recipe in them so that there would be space to add in new recipes when I wanted. Although I still had to make adjustments, it took less moving of recipes to new sleeves this way.

4. I printed up one page with all the names of the recipes (in alphabetical order) with a reference note that told me which book the recipe came from (in case I need to know sometime later). This is my "table of contents" page that I use if I cannot remember the exact name of the recipe. It is easier to look through a list than through the whole book. I also put the table of contents into a plastic sleeve.

5. All of these plastic sleeved pages I then put into a three-ring binder. I keep the binder on a kitchen shelf. When I need a recipe I open up to the right page, take the recipe in its plastic sleeve out of the binder and clip it to a magnet on the refrigerator. Or for my weekly menu, I take out all the recipes in their sleeves for the week according to what my menu plan is and put them on the frig in a clamp-type magnet, rotating each one to the back when I'm finished with it. At the end of the week, I put them all back in the binder and take out the next week's recipes.

6. I also make up a page with my weekly menu plan, put it in a plastic sleeve and keep it on the frig next to the recipes. Here is a photo of the one cookbook I now use. It is relatively "Sharon proof" and it is the only one I need to reach for when I cook.

I am a reformed woman now, no longer wrecking cookbooks. The new ones stay new looking. And the old ones are still surviving. Kind of like me.