What's for Dinner? Now I know!

To help me reach my goal of an organized home I started following the 52 week organized home challenge. You can join anytime so feel free to click the link below.

Home Storage Solutions 101

This week I was organizing my recipes. I'm actually not that disorganized in this department. Probably because I rarely open my cookbook cabinet. I'm sort of stuck in a rut of preparing the same things over and over. This is why getting organized is so important, because even though Jim would probably love it if we had tacos every night, it's probably best that I try to round out my families diet. So below is my current cookbook cabinet. Notice it doesn't just hold cookbooks.

Since we kept other items in the cabinet like the dog's food and a few decorating items like a perpetual calendar that I don't use, I wasn't able to store all my cook books here. Also see the big binder. My mom started it for me about 9 years ago and it holds many of our families favorite recipes. It may look easy to get at but what you can't see is that a pile of recipe printouts, small cookbooks and recipe cards are laying on top of it so pulling my binder out required a bit of work.

So I emptied everything out and got rid of a few cookbooks I didn't need anymore. All the recipes without a home and some recipe magazines were left for me to go over. The great thing about my recipe binder was my mom had already organized it for my. Yea Mom! She divided it into the following sections: appetizers, beverages, cakes and pies, casseroles, cookies and bar candies, desserts, meats, fish, poultry, salads, sauces and dressing, vegetables and misc. There are also pocket pages for recipe cards and cut outs from magazines.I went through the binder and my loose recipes. I threw away any recipe that was to complicated or didn't appeal to my families tastes. So I kept all the dessert recipes! I also kept all the family recipes since they are a part of my past. I then added the recipes I had loose in the cabinet. To my surprise I have quite a bit of fish recipes which is perfect because the season of Lent is right around the corner. No more tuna fish Friday. I would like to share the small box in the middle. A few years ago mom made all the cousins a batch of our Grandmother's favorite candy and she place it in the box with the recipe and a picture of Grandma attached. I now use the box to hold my most used and favorite recipes and it sits on my counter right near me stove. 

So after adjusting the shelves, I was able to place all my cookbooks away. With the exception of the family recipe binder which now sits on my counter ready for use when I'm menu planning. I'm very excited to start sharing with my family some of the recipes I enjoyed when I was growing up. I also went through a few of the recipe books that I like that have quick family dinners. In an Excel spreadsheet I listed each book title, the recipe title and the page number. I will use my spread sheet while menu planning also. This way I don't have to pull down and go through several recipe books each week.
Here is a little tip: If you find a new recipe and try it out on your family and it's a bomb, throw it away right then. You will probably never be making it again so all it's doing is cluttering up your recipe binder or box.

The recipe cabinet was not my only project. This is my laundry room. Notice the shopping bags that are hanging off my brooms. This is a huge annoyance because every time I need my broom or mop I have to take all the bags off first. Now I've been living with this annoyance for years. I don't know why I didn't find a solution sooner.

I guess I had enough because I went out and bought some Command Hooks by 3m and installed them on the wall and laundry room door. No husband or power tools needed. This has probably been my easiest project so far. Again, why didn't I do this sooner? So here is my finished laundry room wall.

Now I can get to my broom. Which means it's time to sweep the floors. Be sure to check back next Friday for more organizing adventures. 

Until next time,

Karri

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