Recipes galore? How I keep them organized

I’m a recipe junkie. Between cookbooks, magazines, and online recipe sites, I have several hundred recipes saved, dog eared, or tabbed for future use. Keeping up with them can be somewhat of a challenge. It gets hard to remember which Cooking Light contained  that great cake recipe when I have 15 back issues of Cooking Light on my bookcase.

One day I stumbled upon a great organizing website – OrganizedHome.com. They have a great set of free downloadable forms and templates to help with everything from meal planning to spring cleaning. I’m a big fan of forms and lists. I’m an even bigger fan of free forms and lists.  My two favorites are the Recipes to Try and Favorite Recipes forms. When I’m going through a magazine and I find a recipe I want to try, I put it on the Recipes to Try list. If it’s good, it graduates to the Favorite Recipes list.

To help keep like items together, I have seperate lists for main dishes, sides, and desserts. I only use this for my paper recipes but you could use them for your online recipes too. I’ll talk about how I manage my internet recipes in a seperate post because that process is a little different. When I’m not using them, I keep them in my household notebook so they don’t get stained or torn plus I always know where they are. How do you keep up with your recipe collection?