Cooking
Posted on October 3, 2018March 25, 2024 by wpengine
The kitchen truly is the heart of the home. Lifetime memories and traditions are made here. From easy one-pot wonders to the tried and true, most of our recipes come from relatives, friends, schools, and churches.
You may even have real treasures such as your mother’s or grandmother’s cookbooks, with handwritten notes on the pages. Maybe you still have your original green Girl Scout cookbook!
Special family recipes are cherished because they tell stories every time we use them. I still remember watching my Grandmother make potato salad at Easter. Her spaghetti sauce, breaded chicken, and rolled sugar cookies remain the stars of my recipe collection.
Continuing her tradition, I have passed along her “special instructions” to my niece and nephew as they’ve grown up: “Don’t overmix your dough or you’ll get tough cookies!” “Warm the milk before you add it so you won’t chill your mashed potatoes.”
How to organize recipes in a binder
We all know how easy it is to accumulate recipes and special cooking notes. Some recipes are cut from newspapers and magazines; some are our oldest, most-used, and splattered recipe cards.
Over the years, they find homes in kitchen drawers, stuffed inside other cookbooks, and underneath boxed pantry items. Wouldn’t it be nice to finally get them all in one place?
Your UniKeep three-ring recipe binder is the new home for all those recipes you’ve torn out of magazines and stored all over the kitchen. It’s fun and easy to start!
Curate your recipe collection
No one likes to admit this, but sometimes it hurts to get organized. Parting with old and outdated cookbooks and recipes is tough. Go through all your recipes and decide which ones you really use (now and in the future); and which ones you simply can’t part with for sentimental reasons.
Only you can determine which ones are “the ones” for your recipe organizer binder. Of course, you can always put together more than one Unikeep family recipe binder!
UniKeep Tip:
Our recipe binder kit (shown above) or your own customized three-ring recipe bindercan be used to organize all your family’s favorite recipes into one location.
You will need these UniKeep products to start:
UniKeep three-ring binder.
Making a personalized recipe binder is fun and easy!
- Choose your binder by color, size, and ring style
- Select binder pockets and tabbed dividers
- Select sheet protectors – click here to see the many shapes and sizes!
- Add some color-coded sheet protectors – pastels and brights
Create a custom recipe binder cover
UniKeep Tip: Print your own binder designsfrom UniKeep binder cover templates. Insert your design into the plastic sleeve on the Unikeep binder cover and you’re done!
To create a customized recipe binder, you will also need:
- A decorative cover insert – create your own by hand or with an online printable
- Scrapbook paper or pretty decorative crafting paper
- Nice pens and colored fine-tip markers
- Stickers and embellishments
- Recipes – from recipe cards, food containers/labels, magazines, and other cookbooks
- Photos – you and your family in the kitchen, during holidays, birthdays, etc.
- Extra recipe cards or plain paper
UniKeep Customization ideas
- Use UniKeep’s plastic divider pages to categorize your recipes and then separate the categories with tabbed dividers.
- Collect all your old handwritten recipes and include a note about who provided them and when: “June Edwards/Church/1989 – her famous peanut butter cookies” and insert that into a UniKeep plastic sleeve.
- Include a list of favorite pantry items – or those most needed for cooking and/or baking – in the front of your binder.
UniKeep Tip: Store your recipe cards and pages in our clear page protector sheets. These archival pages protect recipes from spills and spatters. They will also protect any photos for years to come.
Get Creative! Recipe Binder Ideas
What’s your favorite kitchen and cooking memory? Is it you with your mother, learning how to bake cupcakes for homeroom? Maybe it was the first recipe you made earning your Girl Scout cooking badge. Jotting down these memories make your recipe binder a true keepsake.
UniKeep Tip: Try some journaling with your recipes.
By adding some personal notes and a few pretty stickers and paper to your insert pages, your personalized recipe binder can also serve as a keepsake scrapbook to hand down to your children and grandchildren.
- Include photos of your kids in the kitchen as small children and as they get older. It’s also wonderful to photograph relatives who may visit and share cooking duties and add those to your binder.
- Journal about some special memories – events you cooked for, who was with you, etc. – in notes you insert beside your recipes. Or buy some scrapbook pages and write your entries there and include them in a UniKeep protector sheet.
- Use the UniKeep 4 x 6 photo pages for your recipe cards. Just slip each one into a pocket and you’re done.
- Try a bit of scrapbooking here, too – jot down the kids’ favorite cookie cutters, sprinkles, and cookies – take photos, and include those on some pretty scrapbooking paper beside your recipes.
- Don’t forget “less-than-perfect” kitchen efforts! These may bring funny memories to mind in later years.
Organize your personalized recipe binder by sections
Organize your recipes in a binder according to food type. This can help make your binder look more orderly and can also help you find recipes quicker.
- For example appetizers, beverages, cakes and cookies, desserts, pasta, poultry, salads, etc.
- Use UniKeep’s tabbed section dividers to alphabetize your recipes.
- Arrange the sections in the order you might eat a meal. For example breakfast, lunch, appetizers, salad, main course, dessert, etc.
UniKeep Tip: Create specially-designed recipe binder divider pages – using your pretty craft paper, journaling notes, and embellishments – and slip them into UniKeep color-coded plastic page protectors.
Add a few unique, special sections to your recipe binder
These sections aren’t based on any regular food group, such as soups, salads, cakes, and so forth. These are unique recipes that include dishes from multiple food groups.
UniKeep Tip: Use our tabbed divider pages to clearly identify your groups, and the 4 x 6 divider pages to store any recipe cards you may already have ready to include.
- Include some categories inspired by foods from different countries, such as: Chinese, French, Indian, Italian, Mexican, etc.
- Put all of the recipes you are interested in trying out in their own section.
- Using a UniKeep tabbed divider page, create a special section for holiday recipes. This will make finding all of those recipes for Thanksgiving a lot easier.
Call UniKeep at 800.829.8117 for any assistance
