A Bride’s Recipe for Disorganization
By Lea Schneider, Professional Organizer

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Lea Schneider is a member of the National Association of Professional Organizers and the Association of Food Journalists.

Lee provides hands-on organizing and organizational consulting through her company, Organize Right Now, at www.organizerightnow.com, and her favorite project is the kitchen.

A Bride’s Recipe for Disorganization

Check out all of Lea Schneider's helpful home and kitchen columns at Organize Right Now.

Wearing a veil made from her gift bows and ribbons, the bride continues opening gifts at her shower. Tearing the paper off the gift, she reveals a recipe card box, complete with a stack of 3 x 5 cards decorated with a border of vegetables.

At this point, someone is bound to say “Oh, everyone certainly needs that gift.” Her thanks are genuine. She doesn’t know that she has been given the recipe for disorganization. It’s just not a 3 x 5 card world.

There’s a world of recipes out there, and while the world may not be flat, it is also not sized to fit in a 3 x 5 card box. Just think where that bride’s best recipes might come from. She’s computer savvy, so she’s found some at great food websites, like What's Cooking America and hit the print button. Her best friend emails her chicken enchilada recipe, again she hits print. At the office, a co-worker brings her chocolate oatmeal cookies and a copy of the recipe, which she takes to the copier.

It’s not a 3 x 5 card world!

When our Bride gets time to relax and curls up with her favorite magazines, she spots an article on how to grill and grilling recipes. She tears it out, hoping to try some recipes this summer on the new grill. A few pages later, she finds a cake mix advertisement. It comes with directions on a neat way to doctor a cake mix into a gourmet dessert. She tears that out too.

Again, not a 3 x 5 card world.!

Soon, that bride, who thought she got a gift that would help her stay organized, has discovered it is an 8 ½ x 11 world. Those printouts and tear sheets are stuffed in the pages of cookbooks or pushed into cabinets.

What’s our disorganized Bride to do?

One of the best ways to store recipes is with 3-ring binders and sheet protectors. Sheet protectors are great in the kitchen. They will hold computer printouts as well as recipes torn from magazines. If you have old hand-written recipe cards, you can drop those inside a sleeve protector as well. When you are in the kitchen cooking, spills or splatters easily wipe off. With a click, you can pop open the binder to add more recipes or rearrange them if you wish.
 

Here’s how to get started:

• Based on the number of recipes you have, you can either fill one binder using dividers for categories or you can use multiple binders. The nice thing is that you can add more binders or more pages as needed.
   

• For the project, you will need binders, subject dividers, sheet protectors and plain paper.
   

• Label your dividers. Your categories might include breads, desserts, one-dish meals, meats, seafood, chicken, salads/dressings, side dishes, and soups. Based on your interests, you might add other things like grilling or candy making and so on.
   

• Temporarily place your dividers in a box or file crate. Use them to sort your recipes. Sort your stack of papers into the categories.
   

• Once sorted, work with one category at a time. Place recipes in sheet protectors and place in notebook. Continue until each section is finished.
   

• Add extra empty sheet protectors to each category. This will make it easy to drop in new recipes.

• Create a cover for your book.
   

• Usually, the binders have a pocket in the front of the book. This is a great place to stick recipes you want to try. Once tested and enjoyed, they can then be moved to a permanent home in the book.

Bride, groom, single or long time cook, it’s time to leave the 3 x 5 card world. Creating a custom binder for those 8 ½ x 11 recipes is indeed an organized and thoughtful gift for anyone.

It’s the shower gift that is going to make guests say “Boy, do I need one just like that in my kitchen!”