Recipe Box Tip

Here is my cooking tip for the day. Do you have a recipe box? Is it jammed with random papers and recipe cards, disorganized, and just annoying to look through? My recipe box was like that and so was my mom's. My mom had over 25 years of recipes that she collected. Her box was bursting at the seams with recipes and it took forever to find what you were looking for. Her recipe box was so full that it spilled over into her main cookbook. She had random recipe cards and newspaper clippings stuck inside her book. One day I decided to do something about it and came up with this great idea. I started going through our boxes with my mom and we organized them by category and then we threw out anything that wasn't good or something we wouldn't even make. Then I went through and typed up every card, paper, napkin, or clipping that had a recipe on it. So after about a month of typing everyday I organized everything into sections and then printed off 2 copies, one for me and one for my mom. I used the clear sheet protectors to put the pages in so we could easily add more pages and change around the order. Plus, it makes it more conducive for cooking since you can wipe your pages off.
I put everything in a 3 ring binder with pockets and wrapped it up for her birthday last year. My mom still has her box with all the original recipes in her cookbook cupboard, but I made a more user friendly version of all our favorite recipes which ended up being a little over 100 pages!!! Of course I benefited from all this since I got a copy too and I use it all the time. I also love the fact that my cookbook is also on my computer so when a friend needs a recipe I can just copy and paste it into an e-mail and send it out. I also get a lot of recipes from the Internet so I can just print it off and add it to my book or just paste it to a new document and add any other new recipes that I have. Anyway...I hope this tip helps and go out there and get that box organized!!!