Get organized

It’s Sunday morning and your kid is begging you to make that puffy pancake; you know, the one with the apples and the powdered sugar, the one you made that one time.

Sure, you say, just let me find the recipe.

Just let me find the recipe. Famous last words.

After 30 minutes of culling through clippings, rummaging through hand-written note cards and digging through dripped-on printouts, you give up and haul the family to IHOP.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

You can whip that disorganized heap of recipes into a well-oiled model of cooking efficiency.

You just need to find a method that works for you, whether you prefer old-school recipe cards or new-fangled technology.

It will take a little work up front, but, if you like to cook (and even if you don’t) it’ll pay off in the long run.

“I’m in phase two of my recipe organization; I do have to admit some shame in that,” says Stephanie Swan, a professional organizer from Spokane who runs the Ducks in a Row organizing business.

Swan suggests breaking down recipe organization into a three-step process. First, sort through all of those clippings and scraps of paper and decide what you want to keep and what you want to toss. Then, decide which categories of foods you’d like to use to manage the recipes.

Swan, for example, enjoys baking. So, she has one grouping for breads and muffins, a separate one for cakes and another for cookies.

“It depends on what you do,” she says.

Finally, you need to figure out what system you want to use to organize the recipes, she says.

You could use a recipe box with cards. You could glue them to the pages of a spiral notebook. You could stick them in a self-adhesive photo album.

Swan’s favorite method, and the one she has chosen to use, is to get some big three-ring binders with page protectors and tab dividers.

“You can just open your three-ring binder, take that page out and set it up in your kitchen … You might need two or three of these really nice binders. Go ahead and don’t spare the cost. They’re going to be how you’re going to find your recipes and they’re going to save you a tremendous amount of frustration and grief.”

That’s just what Becky Jones of Liberty Lake has done.

Jones, who says her mother is an outstanding cook, has scribbled down many of her recipes on scraps of paper.

“Over the years, I have stored these longtime family recipes in empty cookie jars and between the pages of favorite cook books,” Jones said in an e-mail.

But that organizational system wasn’t working so well for her.

So, she went to an office-supply store and bought a three-ring binder, along with pages to fit her recipe cards.

“I am starting off 2007 with the feeling of organization in my recipe department,” Jones says. “That makes me very happy.”

Robin Powell, a Post Falls resident, stashes her favorite recipes in a spiral notebook, where she either writes them down or pastes them in.

“It has been a lifesaver for such things as the cinnamon rolls I make every Christmas morning … And for my son’s birthday,” Powell says via e-mail.

Jim Corcoran’s method of organizing recipes is a bit more haphazard. The Sagle, Idaho, man was a Master Food Advisor in Washington for 24 years and has been a Master Food Preserver in Idaho for the last year-and-a-half.

“This is probably the only area of my life that is so disorganized,” Corcoran writes in an e-mail. “My many-year-old ‘Joy of Cooking’ book is filled with recipes that I have gathered over the years. I can say that at least the recipes are located in the cookbook according to the layout of the book.”

But Corcoran, like a growing number of home cooks, is finding that the Internet is all the recipe collection he needs.

“I find this very handy,” he writes.

Not only can you find just about every recipe you’d ever want to make online, you can also find sites that will let you store your entire recipe collection, print shopping lists, figure nutrition information and create meal plans.

One popular site, Allrecipes.com, houses more than 40,000 free recipes from home cooks. Once you register, you can copy any of those recipes into your personal online “recipe box.” You can then type or copy any of your own favorite recipes into the box.

The site also allows you to save favorite Web links to cooking articles or recipes. And you can create reminders about where to find certain dishes in your cookbooks or magazines. You can share your recipes with other Allrecipes users, and you can easily put together shopping lists for any of the recipes in your box.

There are also many different computer programs, in the $20 to $30 range, available to help organize your recipes on your PC or Mac.

But, as with all digital storage options, you might want to keep a back-up.

That’s what Elk resident James McKenzie found out.

“Years ago, I had a nifty computer program for recipes that would not only keep your recipes but also allow you to search recipes by ingredients, do meal planning, select how many servings, and even print out a shopping list,” McKenzie said in an e-mail. “Unfortunately, this software program was incompatible with later versions of MS Windows and was lost when my old (antique?) computer was replaced.”

And then there’s the sense of history you lose when transferring all of your recipes to the computer. No more recipe cards in grandma’s handwriting. No more butter-stained notebook pages.

In those cases, it might be wise to keep a special file for those heirloom recipes.

Swan plans to put some of her recipes on the computer – but not all of them.

“I have some that are so messed-up, that I’ve had them for so long,” she says. “It gives me a sense of peace … I’m not going to throw them away.”