Just call me Martha Stewart

In an uncharacteristic moment of productivity, I decided to organize our recipes. This was a serious decision, considering that Mr. Z's recipes were a jumbled mess that was barely contained by the file folder in which he kept them. Mine, on the other hand, were stuffed randomly into a plastic box which had started out with category dividers, but ended up with 98% percent of the recipes stuffed in front of the dividers due to my refusal to decide where they belonged.

But now?

Why binders? Because they open flat.
And the sheet protectors mean you can pull the recipe out
and if you spill on it, just wipe it off

That's right. Beautiful organization, and it actually wasn't even that difficult. One afternoon I booted the dogs out into the yard and took over the floor of pretty much the entire ground floor of the apartment. Having made an index card for every possible food category, I sat down and divided ALL of our recipes into piles. That exhausted my productive capabilities for the day and each pile was shoved into a folder and tossed on the book shelf.

Then a few days ago, I sucked it up and went to Staples in search of binders and page protectors. One tip... those photo pages for 3x5 photos are perfect for recipe cards. You know, in case you feel productive.


I just did one category at a time so as to avoid getting overwhelmed, and I finally finished up yesterday. Full sheets were put in sheet protectors, while smaller recipes went into 4x6 and 3x5 photo pages. Irregularly shaped, cut out recipes got rubber cemented onto typing paper and went into sheet protectors as well.

Good photography can convince me that someday I might
make a cake shaped like a beehive, complete with
marzipan bees. It could happen...

One perk was discovering all kinds of tasty recipes I want to try. And finding some old ones I'd forgotten about. There's also a whole bunch of Martha Stewart recipes with beautiful pictures that I will most probably never make. But like I've said before, I'm a sucker for good photography...