I LOVE buying cookbooks.  I used to go to charity book sales and buy out their old cookbooks for less than a dollar.  I did this a lot.  Then I joined recipe sharing clubs and iVillages that would send packets of recipe cards every month.  I would get cookbooks as gifts from people who love me and know what I like.  A friend of mine and I would swap recipes via email every Wednesday.  I would print them out from Food Network and other internet recipes sharing sites.

After about 8 years of all of this activity, I ended up with a mountain of cookbooks, boxes upon boxes of recipe cards, and binders full of loose leaf paper upon which random recipes were printed or hand written.  It was a big mess and a terrible eye sore.

When we decided to make the cross-country move from Washington to Pennsylvania, we started purging a lot of our unnecessary items.  One night while resting at my kitchen table after one such purge, my eye was drawn to the messy disaster that I called my “recipe collection” and I came to the resolve that something had to be done about that disorganized dump.  As I started thumbing through my various cookbooks, it occured to me that I would realistically only use a fraction of the recipes in each culinary tome.

“Why do I keep these big bulky books when I would only use a few of these recipes?”

I realized that I asked myself the same question many years ago when it came down to cd’s vs. mp3′s.  I chose to go digital.  Why not go digital with my recipes?  My main personal computer is a laptop and it’s usually sitting in my kitchen anyhow..why not take the time to take the recipes from my cookbooks, put them all in a .doc and keep it on my computer?

I’m doing that right now.  It’s been a long and tedious process.  I really didn’t realize that I had that many recipes lying around.  At the beginning of this process, I caught myself only writing out the recipes for desserts.  When I cook meals, I am more likely to throw things together rather than use a recipe.

“But what about SmellMyPlate?”  I asked myself.  “I need dinner recipes to prepare and share on my website!”  Well that more than tripled the original number of recipes I had picked out.  I’m at about 400 recipes right now and I’m still not seeing an end in sight.  This process is making me more organized and getting rid of some terrible clutter, but it’s been a lot of time and work.

I was uncertain about my comfort levels of having all of my recipes digitized, so I went to my local department store, and bought about 6 cute and matching 3-ring binders and some page protectors so that I can print out all of the recipes and sort them out by Appetizers, Side Dishes, Main Dishes, Beverages, Desserts, and Party Dishes.  This way I can still have recipes in paper form and they will be organized and tidy.

I see so many kitchens with piles of cookbooks and loose leaf paper recipes stuffed into corners.  I used to be the owner of one of those kitchens and it drove me absolutely batty.  I’m sure that this isn’t an original idea, but I’m so happy to be getting some recipe organization going on in my life!