Some time ago I told you about the clean up and reorganisation of my hall cupboard.  One of the things I found frustrating about this clean up was organising my recipes that were stored in there.  Not having the time or the know-how, I had to leave the project of organising them to another day.  After taking on board some of my reader’s ideas and many a long night, I have finally sorted through the hundreds of magazine clippings and have my recipes under control.  Before I share with you my new organisation,  lets see what it once looked like….

The magazine holders were holding LOTS of magazine recipe clippings.  At the end of last year, heavily pregnant I trolled through about 3 years worth of recipe magazine subscriptions and cut out recipes of interest with the intention of organising things but that job was so mountainous, I gave up once all the magazines were picked through.

So reinvigorated, I went through all of the recipes again, culling heaps.  If they had hard to source ingredients, or too many steps, they were gone.  As I went, I sorted them into categories like chicken, seafood and desserts.

Grabbing a whole wad of paper and a glue stick I was just about to stick them all together like jigsaw pieces when I had a realisation.  Most of the magazines I had collected recipes from, compile their recipes on the website, taste.com.au.

I have written before about my love of this site.  Most of the recipes are reviewed and the comments left by others are often helpful in gauging difficulties with the recipe or provide suggestions for changes.   This was helpful in the culling process too, as some of the recipes I intended to pin did have poor reviews.  However, more often than not, Taste had links to similar recipes with fantastic reviews.

The other ‘rouge’ recipe cutouts were mostly out there on the net too – with the original pictures I had found so appealing but had not cut out of the magazines or newspapers.  So given these were so readily available on the net, I was not going to spend hours gluing together pictureless recipes to probably not use because they were hard to find or index.  I was going to use my latest love – Pinterest!

For those of you unaware of the wonderful world of Pinterest, it is virtual pinboard.  It allows you to store, sort and share things you love on the net.  To use this medium to sort my recipes made so much sense.  I take my Ipad so many places so most of my recipes would always be at my fingertips.

Jumping on the net I looked for each of the recipes I had found in magazines and pinned them to category boards.

I love that I have these stored here as I am always stumbling on pin-worthy recipes on my favourite blogs.

After doing this I was still left with a number of cutouts.  I decided that I would glue these onto paper, divided into the categories I had used for my Pinterest boards.   I then put these in a ring binder and separated them into their categories with dividers.

I re-evaluated the recipe books I owned and any that I was unlikely to use, I gave to charity.  While I flipped through the books I took the time to tag recipes I have used or really love with sticky tabs.  This way they will be easy to find.

With everything back in the cupboard, you can see how much of an improvement this organisation project has made.

Not only is its heaps neater, I think it will be much more user-friendly.