Why a recipe organizer? One of life’s simple pleasures is sitting down with family and friends for a delicious, home-cooked meal. Although meals are increasingly prepared and consumed on the go in our fast-paced world, cooking and baking are still two skills that are valued and everyone loves food, whether it is a simple appetizer, elaborate supper, or plate of cookies, that has been made from scratch. However, a frustration that is often felt by cooks is not being able to locate a particular recipe when they are searching for it.
There are many ways to organize one’s recipe collection, and many cooks have their own particular methods that assist them in finding the exact recipe for which they are looking as quickly as possible. One of the most common ways to store and organize one’s recipes is to use a recipe organizer.
Traditionally, a recipe organizer is a wooden box with a hinged lid on the top of the box. The box is designed to fit index cards, whether 3” x 5” or 4” x 6”, on which each recipe is written. These recipe organizer boxes also usually come with divider cards that separate the recipes into sections by type of food, such as breads, soups, deserts, poultry, and vegetables.
Some box-style recipe organizers also come with a hard plastic insert that fits into a groove in the top of the box; this plastic insert can be used to hold a recipe card upright and sit it in the groove, making it easy for the cook to prepare the recipe and read the ingredients and instructions at the same time and hands-free.
More modern recipe organizers take the form of a binder in which recipes printed on 8.5” x 11” paper can be organized and stored. These binders also often come with matching page dividers to segment the binder into various categories, making recipes even easier to find. Recipe organizers in binder form are available in countless different styles; they vary in color, size, and the graphics printed on the outside for decoration.
Even more advanced are the electronic recipe organizers, which are often recipes stored on your computer or other electronic device with a special software program.
Recipe organizers can be purchased in kitchen supply stores such as Sur La Table and Williams-Sonoma, in the cooking sections of retailers like Target and Wal-Mart, and in organization-focused stores like The Container Store. Bookstores like Barnes & Noble sometimes carry a small selection of recipe organizer binders in their cookbook sections. There is also a wide variety of recipe organizers available to purchase online, such as here at RecipeOrganizer.net!
