Archive for ‘Books and Reading’ Category

Blending Libraries: How To Organize Books with Your Sweetheart

Posted on: February 12th, 2024 by Julie Bestry | 18 Comments

Did you know that in addition to February 14th being Valentine’s Day, it’s also International Book Giving Day and Library Lovers’ Day? As someone who’d much rather receive a bouquet of books than flowers, this makes sense to Paper Doll. And February 20th is Clean Out Your Bookcase Day!

The literary and the romantic will always be tied together. I mean, watching or hearing someone declare their love is nice, but being able to read (and reread) the declaration more than two hundred years later? Jane Austen knew what she was doing when she had Persuasion‘s Captain Wentworth’s write this to Anne Elliot. 

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant…

N/A

Reading can be romantic. But let’s face it, there’s nothing romantic about organizing books.

Or is there?

What could be more romantic than your sweetheart making sure you don’t fall and break your neck tripping over their pile of unread books? What could be a finer proof of your love than moving your books off of the kitchen counter so your darling can actually make lunch?

Other than commingling finances, what could require more love and trust than combining your personal libraries?

ORGANIZE YOUR PERSONAL LIBRARY FIRST

Organizing, downsizing, and protecting your personal library (and your reading time) involves a great deal of thought and planning, as I’ve written before in various posts over 17 years, including:

Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it. For example, you could read what Martha Stewart and her favorite peeps have to say about How to Organize Books in a Way That Works for You. 

Conversely, you could review what the Washington Post says in How to Organize Your Books, According to People with Thousands of Them. 

And, of course, even though I’m a professional organizer, I’m a reader first, and I know that there’s much more to a personal library that just arranging books. To that end, I invite everyone to read Freya Howarth’s How to Nurture a Personal Library.

If your own book collection is sprawling, full of duplicates and titles you’ll never read again (or read at all), outdated college textbooks, or other book clutter (did you gasp at “book clutter”?), you can find ways to hide your biblio-addiction in your own, private space.

That works for hermits. However you choose to organize your own books, organizing books when you live with your significant other adds multiple layers of complexity.

WHAT TO CONSIDER WHEN BLENDING PERSONAL LIBRARIES

First, you have to decide whether you’re going to try to blend your books, or keep them separate. Then you have to embrace the difficult work of culling your collections. (If you came to blows trying to figure out whose air fryer or toaster oven you’d use, that was mere child’s play.)

When friends ask me if they should blend book collections with their sweethearts, I say, “Don’t. Books are intimate. Mixing your books is like mixing your toothbrushes. Blech!”

When clients ask me the same question, I am more sanguine, or at least more practical.

When friends ask me if they should blend book collections with their sweethearts, I say, 'Don't. Books are intimate. Mixing your books is like mixing your toothbrushes. Blech!' When clients ask me the same question, I am more… Click To Tweet

Space Invaders — Introducing One Library to Another

We love our book collections. Our personal libraries say something about who we were, are, and hope to be. Exposing our private collections may be awkward or embarrassing, less like when your parents share “baby on the bearskin rug” photos and more like when they show photos of you, all braces-and-bad-perm, at the junior prom.

So, let’s imagine that you and your beloved have just decided to cohabit.

  • Are they moving into your space?

How will you keep from feeling like your terrain is being invaded? If you’ve previously shared an apartment with a friend or just a sub-letting housemate, it’s probably been very clear whose space belongs to whom. Perhaps the division was congenial and you easily divided everything equally; perhaps not.

Will you resent reducing the space available for your carefully curated collection?

It’s one thing to give up space in your closet, bathroom cabinet, or even your underwear drawer, but if you guard your bookshelves fiercely (as most avid readers do), how will you welcome your sweetheart and fellow reader into your space?

  • Are you moving into their space?

Any time two people move in together where one has already been residing, there’s an implicit turf war. How will you feel at home in a home without adequate and fairly representative space for your books, which you may love as much as someone else loves their Labradoodle! You don’t want to feel like an invader, but neither do you want to feel like a guest in what should become your new home.

Divide Without Conquering — How to Share a Space When Both of You Have Custody of Books

Maybe you’re moving together to a new home and get to start fresh. Or, it’s possible you’ve been living together for a while. Whether the two of your are married or otherwise, your home has the potential for a “yours, mine, and ours” problem in the book department.

Separate but Equal, or Joint Custody?

Even couples who enjoy a hot romance may prefer a cool detente when it comes to blending books. You might decide to keep your personal collections completely separate, or only blend books related to your mutual interests or things related to the family as a whole.

If you decide not to mix your collections, you’ll need to at least designate space for who gets which bookcases and shelves. But this leaves questions:

  • How do you achieve fairness?  

Do you opt for parity?

Your instinct may be to just start unboxing your books wherever you’ve identified as a good space for you, like how the first college student to arrive picks the bed and gets the nearest shelf. That’s fine in a dorm room, where each item has its mirror image, but whose apartment or house has truly equal (and equally appealing) space?

If you decide to choose parity, is the solution equal shelf space or equal number of books? What if one person has hundreds of thin volumes of cozy mysteries but another has far fewer titles but they’re all thick and leather-bound?

You may scoff, but I’ve seen married couples who otherwise seem sane and satisfied in their love come to verbal blows over one having more books taking over their joint space. Leaving aside that all but the mildest scuffles might be better suited to the marriage counseling couch than the organizing session, it’s better to anticipate the problem and talk out the solutions.

If you do blend your collections, either partially or in total (notwithstanding your bedside table To Be Read piles), you’re still going to have a lot to consider.

  • How do you deal with duplicates?

First, there’s the issue of when the two partners own the same book. In the name of organization, Sweetie may want to keep the pristine first edition of The Sun Also Rises, but Darling has a bent copy with every margin filled with the wisdom gleaned from a much-loved college literature course (when Darling went through a beret-and-Gauloises-smoking phase).

Typically, when professional organizers work with clients who have duplicate skirts or screwdrivers or spatulas, we focus on what’s in the best condition. However, weighing the value of something that is “the same but different,” like a book that has financial value vs. one that has sentimental or intellectual value, is more difficult.

Before shelving, Sweetie and Darling need to decide how they’ll move forward. Will they purge based on monetary value or let sentiment win?

As Emily Dickinson said, the heart wants what the heart wants. If one partner pushes to purge by discounting sentiment, what will the other partner’s heart want if forced to give up too much?

This doesn’t even take into account when one member of the couple has what the other considers an excessive number of duplicates all on their own. Maybe Sweetums has a copy their first sweetheart gave them, then a refined leatherette copy, and maybe even a 50th anniversary edition? Whether it’s Stephen King or F. Scott Fitzgerald, you’ll have to come to terms regarding how much one “gets” to keep.

  • What organizing system will you use?

Will you shelve randomly, just getting everything out of boxes and onto your bookshelves, figuring you can always organize them later — or perhaps one of you doesn’t care about organizing them at all? (Yes, that was Paper Doll you just heard go, “eek!”)

Will you be systematic, perhaps by author or title or genre? Is it enough for you to separate your fiction from your non-fiction? Or must fiction be chunked into historical eras and then by author, with non-fiction classified by Dewey and his (sexist, racist) decimal system or Library of Congress? 

What if you want to organize by genre and your Honeybunny painstakingly orders (and reorders) books in the order HB intends to read them? Readers have quirky preferences. In Anne Fadiman’s famous essay Marrying Libraries (linked below) she proposed to organize American authors alphabetically by last name, but put British authors chronologically, and then their works chronologically by their publishing date! 

How to organize books is hotly contested. A You.gov survey a few months ago asked more than 29,000 Americans how many books they owned and how they organized them. The results shows a variety of preferences; what’s the chance your Romeo or Juliet organizes books exactly as you do?

(I’d like to refrain from judgement, but — have you met me? I understand the 28% who don’t organize their books, but the 5% who don’t have books? Please, dear readers. Don’t fall in love with serial killers or people who don’t have books.)

  • What role should aesthetics play, particularly with books in public spaces (like the living room or den)?

Should crumbling (but well-loved) books go on the home’s fanciest library shelves? What if one person wants to organize by color, while the other is nauseated by anything too removed from the Dewey Decimal System?

If you share a library with someone who organizes books by whether the cover is red or purple, will you start re-thinking your commitment to the relationship?

What about rules for home library organizing? If you (like Paper Doll) are the type to bring all books up to the edge of the shelf, how will you share your library with someone who pushes books all the way back of the shelf so that the fronts aren’t smooth and picture frames and knickknacks get piled in front of them, or worse, overflow books get double-layered in front of the books in the back and … OMG, I’m hyperventilating!

  • What about the inherent public-facing messages related to content?

What if your partner is embarrassed by your middlebrow tastes? (Maybe they shouldn’t be such a snob about your collection!)

Perhaps you’re cringing at the political leanings reflected by your partner’s books? (You might start wondering if you shouldn’t be with someone whose politics give you “the ick.”) 

  • How will you organize the finances of growing your mutual libraries? 

This is part of a larger discussion in your household. If you’re “just” cohabiting, then you may each buy whatever books you want with your own money. But if you’re married, this is a whole other marriage counselor/financial advisor/professional organizer triple-threat conversation. Will you have “yours, mine, and ours” bank accounts and purchase books accordingly from those accounts?

What about digital purchases going forward? Having one unified Kindle account can be a mess, not only for organizing your digital libraries, but for dealing with ownership if the relationship sours. 

The Ugly Truth

The sad truth is that not all relationships last. The Gotye song Somebody I Used to Know is heartbreaking and universal, especially when he says,

No, you didn’t have to stoop so low
Have your friends collect your records and then change your number

Nobody wants to think about the end of a relationship — of pre-nups and post-nups and dividing community property. But other than personal photos (and the alluded-to music libraries), what could be harder to disentangle than a couple’s library of books?

  • How will you de-blend your book collections in case of a breakup or divorce?

In the mid-1990s, I lent my (now-former) boyfriend my copy of Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy. 

N/A

The end of the relationship stung. Time heals, but I still seethe over the loss of the book.  

Which is more misery-inducing? Haggling over whose signed copy of To Kill a Mockingbird this is, or playing keep-away and refusing to take ownership of The DaVinci Code or Atlas Shrugged or Eat, Pray, Love?

If you do blend your libraries, perhaps take the precaution of putting your initials on the inside cover of your books. Maybe that little insurance policy that you won’t lose your books will give you the confidence to keep working together through the tough times?

BLENDING BOOKS: THE ONGOING DEBATE

This post was supposed to be about love, and now I’ve shared all the troubles I’ve seen in my professional (and personal) capacity. Maybe you’d like someone else’s take?

This 2018 piece from Minnesota’s Star Tribune, Bookmark: Should newlyweds combine their book collections?, offers a sweetly messy take.

The truth is, though, there’s no one right answer. Even the popular blog Book Riot can’t agree. In 2012, Book Riot published How to Say “I Do” to Shared Bookshelves Without Ruining Your Relationship; nine years later, it published, Don’t Merge Book Collections.

The thing is, they were both right.

The earlier, more optimistic post focused on the how-to advice: work together to create a new, joint organizing system; display your books so you and your partner can operate from a position of strength and wisdom; “Leave your Judgy McJudgerton pants in the closet” (which is quite possibly my favorite piece of organizing advice, ever); and compromise. The author, Book Riot’s Chief of Staff Rebecca Joines Schinsky, acknowledged that if things got hot (and not the good kind) over the discussions, you might just decide to blend everything except books.

But Schinsky ends with, “Like committing to a relationship, merging your bookshelves is an exercise in hope.” She eschews the idea of an exit strategy. 

A different Book Riot author, Associate Editor Danika Ellis, was less optimistic in 2021, giving four reasons not to blend books: personal libraries are a reflection of our unique, personal selves; our sorting systems are similarly personal; our systems should work for us; and, as I’ve already noted, relationships end. More cynical than her colleague, Ellis ends with:

Your books will outlive you, and they’ll certainly outlive your relationship, no matter how charmed. So make the right call: prioritize your books. You’ll thank me later.

ORGANIZE BOOKS (WITH YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER) WITHOUT BLOODSHED

Romantic or cynic, you can’t keep the books in moving boxes piled up around you. (Well, as I’ve seen with many clients over the years, you can, but I don’t advise it.)

A few years ago I wrote Paper Doll’s Pop Culture Guide to Decluttering with Your Valentine. It reflected my definitive approach to organizing with the love of your life. Before you think about organizing your mutual libraries, read that. (But I’ll now always look at my comment, “Purge the judgement and toss the guilt,” and wish I’d written, “Judgy McJudgerton pants.”) 

Beyond that, communication is key. You may have a history of long, romantic discussions over favorite books, authors, and genres, but have you ever talked about organization? Go through the issues I raised above: about resentment over invasion or not feeling at home, about parity and systems, about aesthetics vs. function, about finances. And yes, about how to have an insurance policy so the books don’t suffer if the relationship doesn’t make it.

Compromise is hard. I advise creating a system that requires as little compromise as possible. The best relationships are the ones where you are able to maintain a sense of your personal identity as you grow a mutual identity in a couple. You will face enough compromises in other areas of your relationship; do what you can to keep your relationship from impinging on your reading comfort.

Pare down your individual book collections, and then start with them separate —  your shelves and their shelves. You can always create shelves with books for family-specific topics like travel, cookbooks, or household care, and if you grow your family, books for any tiny humans who come along.

That said, be open to reversible experimentation. Getting rid of out-of-print books is hard to reverse, while a new organizing system causing confusion is easily remedied.

Look for helpful alternatives. If you’re both willing to blend libraries but not willing to cull duplicates, consider putting them on a bookshelf in your guest bedroom. Your guests can easily find something to read on sleepless nights. 

Create a library inventory. There are so many apps and online options, like Libib, Goodreads, Library Thing, for documenting what books you own and where you’ve organized them. Just scan your books’ bar codes and the information will populate in a database. Most let you create a field for who brought it into the household (a high-tech version of penciling your initials inside the cover). It will also help you identify duplicates if your collections are large and sprawl across rooms or even floors of the house.

LOVING ESSAYS ABOUT BLENDING LIBRARIES

No Valentine’s Week post on the romantic blending of libraries would be complete without sharing two seminal essays on the topic:

Marrying Libraries by Anne Fadiman, excerpted from her excellent book, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. (My favorite essay in the collection is My Odd Shelf, but the whole book is a reader’s paradise.)

N/A

The Books by Alexander Chee for The Morning News with this: 

It’s hard to explain how moving it was to me to sit down with Dustin’s books on the night I combined our fiction. It took me completely by surprise. I had truly thought it was an ordinary exercise. But it never is with books, I know now.

I began by carefully lifting them off the shelf, dusting them and taking them into the living room.

In some way that wasn’t apparent to me before they sat on the side table, waiting to be sorted, I could see these were the books that had kept him company in those years before he knew me, the books that had helped him turn into him. This hadn’t quite been apparent to me before I took them down to move them.

but also this bit about duplicates, which sums up the whole discussion:

You don’t keep the doubles because you believe you may not stay together. You keep the doubles because the one you own, that’s your friend. The one he owns, that’s his. To only have one, it would be like sharing an email address.

Not everything can be shared. And that isn’t a crisis. It’s how it should be.

If you share your home with a sweetie-pie, how do you organize your mutual book collections?

Paper Doll Presents 4 Stellar Organizing & Productivity Resources

Posted on: February 13th, 2023 by Julie Bestry | 14 Comments

Given that it’s Valentine’s Day week, I wanted to give all of my Paper Doll readers some treats. In this post, we’ll be looking at three books covering organizing, motivation, and productivity, as well as an upcoming video interview series for taking a proactive approach to productivity in leadership.

GO WITH THE FLOW! (The Clutter Flow Chart Workbook)

If you’ve been reading Paper Doll for a while, the name Hazel Thornton won’t be new to you. We’ve been colleagues and friends for many years, and I’ve shared Hazel with you when I interviewed her (along with Jennifer Lava and Janine Adams) for Paper Doll Interviews the Genealogy Organizers and when I profiled her stellar book, What’s a Photo Without the Story? How to Create Your Family Legacy in my 2021 holiday gift list post.

N/A

Hazel is a delight and full of wisdom — and how many other professional organizers do you know who are experts on photo organizing, genealogy, and family legacies and who served on the jury in the famed Menendez trial? 

But Hazel is pretty famous for one other thing — flow charts. If the topic of flow charts even comes up in any organizing circles, Hazel’s is the first (and sometimes only) name that gets raised; she’s that much of a subject matter expert. So, it made sense that Hazel would take her favorite creations from her wealth of flow chart wisdom and leverage them into a resource.

Hazel’s newest book, published just a few weeks ago, is Go With the Flow! The Clutter Flow Chart Workbook. And it’s a whopper for anyone looking for some turn-by-turn directions for getting organized, from where to start to how to progress logically so you don’t get stuck.

This 170-page, 8.5″ x 11″, portrait-oriented paperback workbook includes 17 charts covering all different kinds of clutter:

  • clutter in your spaces (closet, garage, kitchen, office)
  • daily clutter (to-do lists, general paper, kids’ paper, cash flow, mental clutter)
  • legacy clutter (keepsakes, ancestry, photos)
  • life event clutter (holiday activity, holiday décor, occupied staging)

There are even flow charts to tell you which clutter flow chart you need and to help you get back on track if you’ve had some backsliding in the decluttering process.

(You won’t be surprised that Paper Doll‘s favorite flow chart was the one on dealing with paper clutter. But I suspect one of the most useful flow charts overall might be the one on keepsakes.)

Of course, the book would be pretty short if it only had flow charts. In each section, Hazel follows the flow chart with detailed answers to four questions.

  • What is clutter? — You might think you know what type of clutter you’re dealing with, but the book helps you identify items you may not have even considered. In each chapter, this section asks pertinent questions about how you interact with the item (tangible or otherwise) and feel about it, probes whether it needs to be in your life, prompts you to consider its condition or situation, and leads you to make wise decisions regarding whether it still fits you and your life. These are the exact questions we professional organizers gently pepper clients with when we work together.
  • Why can’t I part with my clutter? — As a veteran professional organizer, Hazel doesn’t just tell you to “buck up, buttercup!” but employs the analysis of the “what is clutter?” sub-questions to dig deeply into why the reader might be experiencing challenges in letting go.
  • What should I do with my clutter? — With each distinct category, the book offers clear suggestions as to where that clutter can go so it will really, truly leave your life in the most beneficial way possible.
  • What if, despite my best intentions, I am still living with clutter? — Nobody’s perfect. And Rome wasn’t built (or decluttered) in a day. So, the book has guidance for continuing to make progress and for getting support.

There’s bonus material, like resources for getting help organizing and decluttering and blank clutter worksheets to help you identify answers and track efforts. (Be sure to read the content in the clutter worksheet examples, because Hazel’s down-to-earth sense of humor shines there!)

In addition, there’s a special section advising professional organizers how to use the content of the workbook with clients.

Go With the Flow! is subtitled The Clutter Flow Chart Workbook, and for those who are feeling stuck with (or stymied by) their clutter, this can be the catalyst to actually make progress by working through the clutter instead of just reading about it. The combination of the flow charts, where their visual approach to “If X, then Y” fork-in-the-road decision trees, with straightforward prose coaching through the what’s and why’s of decluttering, offers a one-two punch for knocking clutter out of your life.

Go With the Flow! The Clutter Flow Chart Workbook is available for $27.50 at Amazon. If you’re in Australia (to which Amazon/KDP will not market books with color images), or if you desperately want a landscape-oriented version of the book, you can purchase a PDF copy directly from Hazel’s website. (It’s a slightly finicky process, Hazel reports, so do follow the instructions.)  

DO IT TODAY

You’ve got dreams that sparkle. Friends see your eyes light up when you talk about your big, bold visions for the future. You know you’ve got fabulous ideas inside of you that can make the world smarter, happier, healthier, weirder (in a good way), or just plain better.

So why aren’t you working on them?

Why aren’t you getting on that stage, giving your TED Talk or taking a bow for your award-winning creation? Why are you scrolling through social media or counting your excuses or being held back by fear? 

Once I got Kara Cutruzzula’s Do It Today: An Encouragement Journal in my hands, I realized I’d never seen a journal like this. It’s colorful and beautiful, with each turn of the page yielding a vibrant new palette, but the aesthetics are just the frosting on this empathetic, wise cake, a combo of a journal and motivational coach.

Friend-of-the-blog Kara Cutruzzula is a writer and editor, and I start my day reading her newsletter, Brass Ring Daily. BRD is pithy, perky, and just philosophical enough to get you out of your bed and headed to the coffee maker. (Kara is other things: a musical theater lyricist, playwright, podcaster, and fellow Gilmore Girls aficionado. But the rest I’m saving for an upcoming interview, so you’ll just have to be patient.) 

N/A

As a follow-up to her Do It For Yourself, the first in her Start Before You’re Ready series, Do It Today offers gentle motivational coaching. Read straight through and tackle the guided motivational exercises one by one, or devour the section-starting essays and then ping-pong through exercises that resonate most with you on that day.

(Or, perhaps start each day with the journal, using an exercise as Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way-style morning pages?)

Personally, I’ve started using Do It Today to help me avoid procrastination by — you guessed it — procrastinating with the journal. When I find myself doing everything except the writing or project I really know I should be working on (to reach my own goals), I settle in to reread one of Kara’s essays and then tackle a journal entry. (In full disclosure, the journal is so beautiful that I can’t bring myself to actually write in it, and tend to type my responses so that I don’t obsess about my ever-more chicken-scratchy handwriting.)

To give you sense of the approach, the chapter-starting essays include:

  • Go Toward Your Nerves
  • Start Before You’re Ready (I’m sensing a theme here!)
  • Don’t Be Productive, Percolate Instead — Worth the price of admission!
  • Stamina, Courage, and Mirages
  • Sweet, Sweet Rejection — Trust me, whether you fear failure (or, like me, fear mediocrity), Kara’s stance here will conjure up the best kinds of attitude adjustments.
  • Weave a Generous Web
  • Do It Today 

It would be hard to pick, but the chapter on percolation is probably my favorite. Maybe because Kara’s writing here dovetails with what I wrote in my series last year on toxic productivity, I was prepared to embrace what she had to say. Or maybe it’s because she illustrates (through a tale of John Steinbeck and examples you’ll recognize from your own life) that percolation is a brilliant cheat code.

Have you ever circled an idea for a while, finding the tendrils of a concept while never locating key to actually getting started?

Percolation is “…giving yourself time and space to think without the extra pressure to track your performance…allowing yourself to enjoy reflecting and exploring your options.” Instead of coming up with ready-for-Prime-Time ideas, Kara helps you find your sources of inspiration, ideas, and solutions, areas you may have closed yourself off from by focusing on the perfect end result. Long story short, when you’ve focused too long on the checkmark at the end, Kara reminds you to focus on the joy of creation and accomplishment.

In each chapter of Do It Today, Kara has interspersed pop-art messages to uplift, free-writing journaling prompts, and list templates to get you thinking.

Some of my favorite, deceptively astute lines and what they mean to me:

  • You are more powerful than your productivity — battering toxic productivity’s lie that your worth comes from what you deliver
  • Everyone is just trying their best with the information they have — reminding you that none of us are perfect and prompting us to start now (because you can’t edit a blank page)
  • Look at all you have — focusing on gratitude as well as noticing the bounty we possess rather than the short stack and what we lack
  • Do, don’t overdo — I think I resemble — I mean, resent — that remark. I feel seen.

In terms of journaling prompts, in the section on starting before you’re ready, there’s a page that asks, “Is there one conversation you’re not ready to have? Even if you don’t know how to say it, begin here by writing a few possible opening sentences.” Down deep, you know this works. You’ve felt a sense of ease after telling your BFF about a problem at work and how you dread dealing with it. But by letting yourself stop thinking of the issue, and just giving yourself a few minutes to think about it, in context, you’ll find the weight is lifted!

I suggested one of the prompts from the Courage chapter to a client who wanted to apply for an opportunity but feared putting herself forward. Kara writes, “Have you ever had to ask someone to write you a letter of recommendation? What if you wrote one for yourself, highlighting your strengths and what you would bring to your next opportunity?” It worked!

The list-making prompts are incredible in their powerful simplicity. If you’re feeling like a slug, unable to clarify your thoughts, Kara encourages that you write a list of ten ideas completely unrelated to your current project, and offers some examples. The key is that taking your focus off of a lack of productivity hoovers up all the cobwebs.

Other list prompts help you strengthen your arsenal of motivation-boosting weapons of stress-destruction, like noting people who’ve historically provided safe spaces for you to share your works in progress.

I can’t do justice to this creative, colorful guide to getting un-stuck, but I’d describe it as being like meeting your most inspiring friend for brunch and leaving full of waffles and excitement.

Do It Today is available in paperback for $16.99 or Kindle for $9.99 at Amazon, as well as at Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop, Powell’s, and Indigo. You can also purchase directly from the publisher, Abrams Books. 

PRODUCTIVITY FOR HOW YOU’RE WIRED

My longtime colleague Ellen Faye is a consummate professional and ridiculously unflappable. She’s a Certified Professional Organizer®, Professional Certified Coach, and Certified Productivity Leadership Coach. She’s even been the president of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals!

Ellen recognized that there are far too many books out there by coaches telling readers how to be successful they way they, the coaches, have done it. Ellen, however, saw that her clients needed productivity solutions and systems that worked for them, not merely for her. That realization of the need for customization inspired her to write Productivity for How You’re Wired: Better Work. Better Life.

Front cover of Productivity for How You're Wired by Ellen Faye

Ellen’s book is designed for people seeking to be “more intentional about how they use their time and live their life,” and the book approaches this concept in three main ways. 

First, she wants readers to understand how they are truly wired with regard to how they deal with time and productivity. Ellen recognizes that individuals have different needs and ways of thinking in terms of structure preference as well as productivity style. 

In the first section of the book, Ellen guides readers to identify how their brains work best. She explains far better than I could even attempt, but the key is that you have to understand whether your priority focus is tasks vs. relationships, and then really comprehend what kind of structure (low, medium, or high) you need in your work and life — that’s situational structure. Through clear examples and charts, she walks you through identifying where, given your focus and structure preference, you’ll thrive or feel overly confined, struggle or succeed, power up or feel lost. 

Meanwhile, Ellen’s take on productivity style borrows from, and refines, other research on the topic, and the book helps you isolate which productivity style (Catalyst, Coordinator, Diplomat, or Innovator) best fits you, laying out the characteristics and best work process approach for each. It’s really eye opening.

This section also illustrates how understanding challenges like perfectionism, procrastination, chronic stress, and burnout plays into making positive changes.

In the second part of the book, Ellen teaches the reader how to create a productivity flow framework to transform current unworkable systems into customized pathways to success. Productivity for How You’re Wired walks you through setting your goals and intentions, using a time map, defining the essential structures, creating a priorities task list, and doing your daily and weekly planning. 

Productivity books often have one uniform approach to everything and then vague pointers for understanding how to begin and continue; you have to find where you fit in. Instead, Ellen provides detailed guidance so that no part of your life is going to fall through the cracks. Basically, it’s like having Ellen as your coach, sticking by you step-by-step, so you can get clear on your priorities and focus on the essentials elements for achieving what means the most.

The third part of the book combines the deep understanding you’ll gain regarding the right approach for you and the overarching framework you developed so you can apply the concepts to your own life and work demands. Using the right structure preferences and productivity style, you’ll see how to deal with meetings, email, decision-making, remote work, team leadership, and more.

I particularly liked that Productivity for How You’re Wired‘s chapters start with “Highlights,” overviews of what’s coming so that you can find your place. (I like to know where I’m going when I read so I have an “ah-ha” when I get there!)

The book has myriad real-life stories to help you see parallels between your situation and others who’ve been through it and achieved success. To that end, each chapter also has “Making It Fit” charts so you can make decisions using your own structure preference and productivity style and know what to do in the situation described.

You can use the Productivity for How You’re Wired as a bit of a workbook, as each chapter ends with a place to note those “Takeaways” you don’t want to forget and commit to the “Actions” you’ll take to help you develop your own systems.

The only drawback to the book is that some of the material on the charts can be hard to read (due to the confines of a tangible book); however, there are colorful versions of the charts available online, which allow you to expand the charts so you can see them more clearly. There are also supplemental resources on the website. 

Productivity for How You’re Wired is fluff-free. This is just about the meatiest book I’ve ever seen on achieving personalized productivity. This book is a real commitment — to yourself and the material — but short of working in person with Ellen herself, it’s an amazing way to tweak every detail of your approach to work and life to fit in everything important to you. If you make the commitment, I think you’ll be impressed with what you get out of it.

Productivity for How You’re Wired is available from Amazon for $17.64 for paperback or $9.99 on Kindle.

CREATING ORDER AMONG CHAOS

Starting February 15th and running through February 28th, I’m participating in the adventurously titled Creating Order Among Chaos: How To Effectively Manage The Everyday Whirlwind Of Responsibilities So That You’re Empowered To Do More Leading & Less Reacting!

This free online video retreat is headed up by personal coach and business consultant Robert Barlow from Perpetual Aim. You might recall his name from when I did Robert’s The Leader’s Asset series on prioritization and leadership last summer.

If you’re a solopreneur or small business owner, you know what it’s like when you’re constantly reacting instead of acting, always putting out fires (that often turn out to be fireflies) instead of setting off your own carefully planned fireworks. Simply put, it can feel impossible to feel like you’re running the show, and instead everything (and everyone, and every sensory input) is distracting you from achieving success. 

It’s hard to lead when the ducklings behind you keep getting out of line. It’s hard to make progress when the phones won’t stop ringing about yesterday’s efforts (and other people’s priorities). That’s where the video retreat comes in!

Robert has gathered 14 speakers, myself included, who all share a passion for empowering small business owners and professionals to work more on their businesses instead of in their businesses (to borrow from Michael Gerber’s now-classic The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It.)

Each of us participating are bringing our knowledge and expertise to these short but powerful video interviews with Robert, and you can anticipate that each will leave you with actionable options to achieve your priorities. Topics covered will include:

  • How to manage juggling responsibilities
  • How to lead and delegate to others
  • Ways to create stronger boundaries so that you are less overcommitted and overwhelmed
  • Tips, tools, and strategies that move you forward in life
  • What thinking patterns are keeping you mired in place
  • How to stay connected with your vision, goals, and ideals
  • How to manage your time on a day to day basis to accomplish what you desire.

This two-week video series is virtual; that means you can watch it at home, in the office, on your commute (provided someone else is driving the car/bus/train), or wherever you can get away from the hubbub.

I think we’d all love the opportunity to pick the brains of experts in productivity and leadership, and have conversations to help guide professional success. I’m excited to not only have contributed my thoughts, but I can’t wait to hear what the other experts have to say. Participating experts include:

And that’s only hitting half of the presenters! 

I have a complimentary ticket for you to attend. Just click on https://perpetualaim.com/JulieBestry to register for this free, online two-week “retreat,” and you’ll start getting emails to take you to each daily interview. I hope you’ll attend, and if you watch my interview with Robert, feel free to come back and share your thoughts on what I’ve said about conquering overwhelm and achieving prioritized focus for improved leadership.

Happy Valentine’s Day, my wonderful readers. I hope these books and the video series will help you achieve your organizing and productivity goals.

Much (productive) love,

Paper Doll

Calm Cooking Chaos (Part 3): Organize With Recipe Apps

Posted on: November 21st, 2022 by Julie Bestry | 10 Comments

Recipes aren’t just recipes. They’re guidebooks to health. Remembrances of family legacies. Step-by-step guidelines for bringing people together. The fact that most people’s recipes are messy and scattered from cookbooks to index cards to clippings (and online) reflects modern life. Families are scattered across time zones; people’s schedules are filled to the brim. Bringing order to recipe collections and cooking plans helps bring order to your life.

Bringing order to recipe collections and cooking plans helps bring order to your life. Click To Tweet

In the last two posts, we looked at how to organize recipes from a number of perspectives.

Calm Cooking Chaos (Part 1): Organize Your Paper Recipes covered paring down recipe excess and creating a tangible binder (or set of binders) to organize and keep track of all of your important recipes, divided by categories. This method is approachable and designed for any skill level.

Calm Cooking Chaos (Part 2): Organize Your Recipes Digitally looked at three methods for digitally organizing recipes, from how to get them into digital form to how to make sense of them once you do. We looked at organizing through creating computer files, using Evernote to finesse the system with notes, notebooks, and tags (and ramp up the system with amazing Boolian search power), and employing Pinterest to organize visually.

APPS FOR ORGANIZING YOUR RECIPES DIGITALLY

The previously mentioned systems, and especially Evernote, aren’t designed for cooks, so specialized apps have been developed to bridge the gap and help collate and organize recipes specifically. 

As has been firmly established, Paper Doll is not a cook but an organizer. So, the following post is not a review of apps, but is merely informational. (If you burn the Thanksgiving pie because an app had a wonky public-facing recipe (or because you set your oven to 500°, that’s not on me.) 

When trying to assist my clients in organizing their recipes, we first downsize and collate to make sure we know what’s important to them; the very last step is storing recipes, whether on paper or digitally. My clients have different needs, and have chosen different apps, each with their own merits and demerits.

Make sure you take into account ease of use, ability to clip recipes and/or import them or create your own, and the granularity of the search function in any prospective app selection.

Meal-planning functions or one-click shopping list may be important to you, or you might hunger for a social recipe-sharing aspect. Caveat cibus praeparator (which was the closest I could get to the cook equivalent of “caveat emptor” — it directly translates as “food preparer beware”).

Paprika Recipe Manager

 

 

 

 

Paprika Recipe Manager is a classic in this field. Paprika lets you add your own recipes via uploading from your camera, but it’s really designed to let you capture recipes you find online (like through Google, on blogs you read, from recipe sites, etc.). Add the bookmarklet to your browser and click (much like the Evernote Web Clipper we discussed last week), or navigate to the web page you want from within Paprika’s browser and find the recipe you want.

In general, you’re capturing recipes with one click. Once you’ve added a recipe to your Paprika account, it uploads to the cloud, auto-formats the recipe, and syncs automatically across your devices, so if you add a recipe to your phone while scrolling in the grocery line, you’ll be able to pull it up from your tablet in your kitchen. Once uploaded, the recipes can be sorted by category  and searched.

Paprika can also help you generate smart grocery lists based on the recipes you save; the app intuits where individual ingredients can be found and sorts and assigns them to specific aisles (Produce, Dairy, Canned & Jarred, etc.). If you’ve got the same ingredients in multiple recipes you tell Paprika you’ll be making, it will combine them so you’d know you need 6 eggs across three recipes, or two apples for two different meals.

Paprika has interactive features to help you keep your place in a recipe — tap to highlight a step or cross off a now-used ingredient. Paprika can also help you scale ingredients for different number or size servings, convert measurements to metric (and back), and set timers.

Paprika has platform-specific apps ranging from $4.99 (mobile) to $29.99 (computer); each app is sold separately, which can get pricey. However, all versions are on sale now through the end of November 2022 for 40%-50% off: iOS ($2.99) and Android for mobile, and Mac ($14.99) and Windows ($14.99) for computers. 

Users have noted that the different versions of Paprika excel at different things. So, when you want to save one of your own recipes or capture from online, it’s somewhat easier on a computer; however, for grocery shopping, you’re obviously going to want to access the app on a mobile device. For cooking, itself, you’ll likely want the largest text possible and not want to have to hold your phone, so using a tablet may split the difference.

Paprika works best when you’re using its built-in browser, so bear in mind that if you’ve tricked out Chrome or Safari with extensions and share buttons galore, you’ll have to remember to switch to Paprika to surf recipe sites. Otherwise, you’ll have to copy a link from your regular browser and paste it into Paprika to capture it. Your comfort level will depend on how much you usually personalize your tech.

Big Oven Recipes & Meal Planner

 

 

 

 

 

Big Oven — Around since 2003, this platform has all the standard features you might seek. Upload your own scanned recipes, copy and paste a recipe from a text document, type your recipe in Big Oven’s simple form, or clip online recipes with the Big Oven Clipper bookmarklet. 

Use up leftovers by typing in three ingredients you have on hand in your pantry, fridge, or freezer, and Big Oven yields screens of recipe options (with photos and titles) as static recipes or videos. You can even narrow it from all of the sites’ recipes to just from your own collection, or toggle categories like main dishes, desserts, side dishes, soups and stews, salads, etc. I entered cheese, butter, and eggs and then filtered for appetizers and got more than my fair share of pages of mouth-watering options.

Big Oven has over one million recipes already uploaded from more than 3000 food bloggers and worldwide websites (with attribution and permission — Big Oven takes copyright seriously). They’re divided by searchable categories including courses (breakfast, dinner, etc.), collections (low-carb, vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, keto, low-sodium, easy weeknight dinners, make-ahead recipes, and yes, my favorite, a whole collection for grilled cheese!), and editorial content, as well as a search by ingredients.

It also has meal planner and grocery list functions. 

Use Big Oven in your browser on your computer, or download the iOS or Android apps. Big Oven’s basic membership is free, and includes the million+ recipes and search, the grocery list function, the Leftovers tool, and access via web, mobile, and tablet. However, you can only save up to 200 recipes; for more, plus advanced organization and nutrition tools, there’s a Pro version ($2.99/month or $24.99/year).

Pestle

 

 

 

 

 

Pestle feels like the most modern, high-tech version of all of the apps in this list, but it’s iOS-only, so if you’re Android or prefer to handle your recipes on your computer, it’s not for you. It’s also designed more for collecting and organizing recipes from the web than from your own collection. 

When you identify a recipe you want, Pestle scan the recipe for ingredients, steps, nutritional information, etc., and save the information for you. Then Pestle turns the recipe into a step-by-step guide, so cooks who ordinarily get overwhelmed and keep losing don’t need to worry.

Pestle lets you tap the screen to start an unlimited number of timers (good for holiday cooking!). Cooler still, you don’t have to touch your device at all — just say “Next”, and Pestle moves the recipe to the next step for you.

Via Apple’s SharePlay, Pestle also gives you the opportunity to cook along with anyone else, anywhere. Get on FaceTime, start cooking with Pestle, and the steps synchronize between you and your cooking buddy. Click Next on your screen, and it moves to the next step for both of you!

The Pestle Household function allows you to share both recipes and meal plans with anyone designated as friends or family, so when you save a recipe to your device, it shows up at their end, too!

The app also does scaling and conversion calculations, so if you need to change servings from 4 people to a dozen, Pestle does the math. It will convert Imperial measurements (that’s what we Americans use, even though we don’t have royalty) to metric (and vice versa). 

Dish Dish

 

 

 

 

Dish Dish helps you clip recipes from cooking sites using its recipe import tool or type your recipes in, and then arrange them into collections or cookbooks. Users can search their recipes, tag them, and choose a preferred level of privacy.

Opt to keep collections private or share them with the Dish Dish community (or just with Dish Dish friends); you can also share your recipes selectively via email or on social media. There’s also a social aspect on Dish Dish, letting you comment on other users’ recipes.

The recipe search lets you sort and search by category (everything from food type, like beef or eggs or fruit, to meal type, like main dish or breakfast), by cuisine (almost A-Z, from African to Vietnamese), or by tags you’ve selected. Note, unlike the Evernote tagging we discussed last week, you must choose pre-existing tags in the system, like for specific events or holidays (Thanksgiving, baby showers), special needs (cancer care, diabetes-friendly, low cholesterol), or gadget (convection oven, slow cooker). 

Avail yourself of their huge substitutions list in case you get halfway through a recipe and find you’re missing something fairly vital. For math-phobic folks, Dish Dish will recalculate ingredient measurements with one click — just enter the number of servings you want.

Dish Dish works on the web or in mobile apps; the apps are free, as is the basic membership, which lets you add recipes, tag/organize/search, connect with friends, and view both public and friends’ recipes. There are also two levels of paid membership with additional features: Private ($19/year) gets you unlimited recipe sharing, the shopping list, a menu planner, and friend’s recipes, while Private Pro ($29.99) has private recipe sharing and unlimited recipe sharing.

Dish Dish’s allegedly also has concierge service (mentioned on their promotional video, but I couldn’t find it on the site), whereby you can send 30 recipes to them to input for you. 

Personally, I found the site to be a bit buggy, and was disappointed by the lack of photos in a lot of the public recipes. I also noticed that many of the recipes are incomplete beyond the ingredients and instructions, so the fields for prep time or cook time may be blank.

Recipe Box

 

 

 

 

 

Recipe Box works on the web via your browser or an iOS-only app (sorry, Android, Chrome, and Firefox folks) and is designed more for the person whose recipes are all over the internet (whether privately saved or public-facing). Save the URL of any recipe you find online to get just the recipe, but none of the background stories, ads, or the rest of what surrounds the recipe so you can focus on the cooking.

Add a recipe to your collection in one of two ways: either copy the URL of a recipe (from an article, blog post, Evernote, Pinterest, etc.), launch the app, and select “Import URL,” or use the Share Extension from your browser.

To organize your collection, just add a “category” to whatever recipe you’ve saved; then choose from their tags or create your own. Search to browse all recipes or within categories (breakfast, lunch, dinner; keto, vegetarian; Asian, Indian, Italian, Mexican, etc.). In addition to any recipes you add yourself, the site is packed with recipes from a variety of blogs and sites, like the Food Network and other recipe management sites (like Big Oven).

As with most platforms, Recipe Box has cloud sync, so if you’ve saved a recipe through your phone, it’ll show up in your account when you log in via your computer, and vice versa. 

On the plus side, Recipe Box is free. However, it lacks many of the functions (shopping lists, meal planning, substitution lists, calculations) other recipe management tools have.

ChefTap

 

 

 

 

ChefTap can be bare bones or as fancy a recipe management tool as you want, depending on which version you select. It syncs in the cloud and can be used online or off, but you must use the mobile app (Android or iOS) to register for an account. (The web app is downloadable at no cost from Amazon.)

Add recipes in a variety of ways: use ChefTap’s built-in browser to open recipe sites and then import recipes (meaning you can’t use your preferred browser as you surf), import recipes from text files, paste a URL from an online recipe site, or type in one of your own recipes manually. (Of which, more later.)

To keep your recipes organized, avail yourself of tags, favorites, sorting by category, and searching.

With ChefTap’s free account, store up to 100 recipes and manually enter or edit recipes and add photos. Manual entry is fine for copying your personal recipes, but if you want to manually save online recipes, you’ll have to copy and paste content into each of pre-existing fields. The Free version only lets you sync your mobile with your web account every ten days, which seems a bit risky. 

However, if you want to save more recipes, create smart grocery lists, access the menu planning feature, get unlimited syncing or use the web clipping feature, you’ll need a Pro account. The Pro version also has a “recipe cloning” feature that allows you to take a pre-existing recipe and duplicate and modify it so you can keep both versions. The Pro version costs $19.99/year.

Even More Recipes Organizing Apps & Platforms

With so many apps and sites in this field, this could be a month-long series all on its own. Here’s a short list of other recipe organizing platforms you may want to consider.

OrganizEat — Snap a photo of a handwritten recipe or cookbook page, type into freeform fields, or import an online recipe with one click, then categorize in folders and tag to help you find what you want when you want it. It syncs across all devices, works on iOS, Android, and on the web on Chrome, Edge, and Safari. (Check out the tutorials.) Fun feature: Cooking Mode on your mobile device keeps the recipe full-screen and won’t let your device go dark if you haven’t touched it in a while. Play around with the basics for free but features are limited; the iOS/computer subscription upgrade is $3.33/month or $39.99/year; the beta Android version is $27.99. 

Copy Me That — This free platform is a recipe clipper that lets you edit and tweak what you’ve captured. Organize recipes into with collections and then search, filter, print, email, and share via text or social sites. If you upgrade to premium, you can also scale your recipes for more servings.  Shopping list and meal planner features are included, and it runs in any browser or via iOS or Android apps, and then syncs across devices. 

Mela — This award-wining iOS/Mac-only platform is a hybrid recipe organizing app and RSS reader. Scan recipes from a book or clips from Mela’s own in-app browser to build your personal collection, and subscribe to your favorite recipe blogs from within Mela. The Cook Mode  highlights only the step you’re currently on and dims the others; it also lets you cook multiple recipes concurrently, like on Thanksgiving! There’s also a meal planning calendar, grocery lists, and timers.

Recipe Sage — Collect, organize, and keep recipes, perform drag-and-drop meal planning, and develop a shopping list with this free, open-source (with donations accepted) personal recipe platform. There’s a powerful search and you can tag recipes to filter to your needs and preferences. It works on the web as well as Web, IOS, and Android.

Whisk — Save online recipes using the app’s mobile share extension in Chrome, scan and digitize your physical recipes with your phone’s camera, input your own recipes with the recipe builder, or collect recipes from the member community. Then customize recipes with edits or substitutions. Organize with collections, then search by ingredient or recipe name, and filter by cuisine or dietary needs. Whisk also lets you drag and drop meal plans, create instant shopping lists, and share with friends. Whisk is available for iOS or Android, and is free.

APPS FOR LETTING THE WORLD ORGANIZE RECIPES FOR YOU

Not all people who cook, or who would like to cook, have their own robust recipe collections. Some people are happy to let the internet or apps make arrangements for them. Think of it like  a library and card catalog and interlibrary loan; instead of feeling like you have to have all the books in your own house, you can acquire what you want to read from the library.

So, you don’t need an app. Just Google! Type the ingredients you have on hand into Google. For example, if you type “bread butter cheese” into Google, it will yield a variety of recipes, mostly for grilled cheese sandwiches (yum!) using those ingredients. They’ll be divided into sections by recipe type: photos, videos, and text.

If you have a Google assistant, like Home or Nest, or Alexa on your phone, you can say “Hey, Google, find me a lasagna recipe,” which will yield oodles of gooey options. Continue with commands as shown in this video to have recipes read to you, step-by-step.

There’s also Kitchn’s Recipe Box  — Sometimes, you want the equivalent of a bookmark for your favorite sites without having to actually use your browser’s bookmarks or saving to a notes app. Imagine you’re on the Kitchn website, perhaps perusing this Sirniki (cheese pancake) recipe. (Paper Mommy simply calls “cheese patties.” Delish!)   

Reading a recipe? Comment or click a button to take you past the backstory (because some people apparently hate the stories on recipe sites). Or, click “Save to My Recipes” and anytime you visit Kitchn, visit your account and look at the recipes you’ve saved in your Kitchn Recipe Box.

APP FOR INDEXING YOUR RECIPES

 

 

 

Eat Your Books is a different sort of app/platform altogether. I first wrote about it back in 2011 in Paper Doll Suggests That You Eat Your Books (To Organize Your Recipes), and most of that is apt, but it’s grown a lot since then.

Eat Your Books doesn’t have recipes on the site. Rather, it indexes a bazillion recipes (well, more than a third of a million) from 160,000+ cookbooks, as wells as blogs, magazines and websites, into a massive library database, with recipes listed and searchable by title, author, ingredient, and even ISBN (if they come from cookbooks).

Search for “polenta” or “kale” or “cheese.” Further filter by recipe type (from books, magazine, or online; video recipes; occasions, ethnicities, courses; and much more.) You can then sort recipes alphabetically, by author, by publication date, by PR buzz, by rating, or even by how recently it was added. 

I filtered for “cheese” and “Thanksgiving” and “appetizers” and got offerings like these, below. Yum.

From the perspective of indexing your own cookbooks, imagine you know you have a recipe for a special casserole or icebox cake, but not enough time to search to find the right page in the right cookbook for your spouse’s fave.

Once you’ve created your own Eat Your Books bookshelf, you can search and filter what you seek in the same way as with the library, but from your personal collection, then know to walk to your bookshelf, pluck the right book and go to the right page, and get on with cooking. (You can also add recipes from Eat Your Books’ online library to your own bookshelf.)

Non-members can search the site to get some familiarity, but registering for a free Eat Your Books membership lets you save up to five books and five magazines to your virtual bookshelf, index online and personal recipes, and use the search functionality. Free members can also request that books be indexed by the Eat Your Books team, build grocery lists, add notes for recipes and books, enter contests, and socialize on the community forum.

A Premium membership is $3/month or $30/year. (I got a lifetime membership back in 2011 when I researched that old post, but sadly, those are no longer available.) At the Premium level, you get everything in a free membership, plus the ability to add and index an unlimited number of cookbooks and magazines to your bookshelf. (No, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still pare down your cookbook collection! Don’t try to be sneaky! Paper Doll is watching.)

If literally any recipe in any book or magazine in your house (assuming you’ve added it to the virtual bookshelf) is indexed, Eat Your Books will tell you where to look. No more eating your heart out, searching for recipes. Instead, you can eat cheese. Or, y’know, whatever you like best.

I hope this three-post series for organizing your recipes has given you plenty of ideas and inspiration as we enter the season of celebratory eating,

From the entire Paper Doll team (OK, from me and Paper Mommy), may you have a happy, healthy, delicious, and organized Thanksgiving.

Readers, I am thankful for you!

Calm Cooking Chaos (Part 2): Organize Your Recipes Digitally

Posted on: November 14th, 2022 by Julie Bestry | 12 Comments

We’re now one week closer to “Recipe Season,” which spans from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day. Whether you’re aiming to replicate everyone’s favorite tried-and-true or you’re looking to discover (or invent) a recipe to dazzle the tastebuds, it all begins with organization.

Last week, in Calm Cooking Chaos (Part 1): Organize Your Paper Recipes, we covered how to gather your paper recipe collection (from cookbooks, magazines, clippings, family scribblings, and note cards), sort them, downsize, and create a recipe binder.

BUT FIRST, WHY NOT FILE FOLDERS?

Before moving on to digital recipes, I’d like to note why I focused on binders but ignored recipe files using the same categories. Given that, as Paper Doll, I’ve brought you 15 years of pro file folder posts, a few readers wondered about this omission.

The truth is, as great as file folders are for most reference categories (including financial, legal, medical, household, and personal papers), recipes in file folders tend to be more easily forgotten. In two decades of testing recipe filing with clients, I’ve noticed that paper recipes organized in binders tend to be flipped through and used more frequently, while file folders of recipes, sorted and categorized in the same manner, tend to be ignored and often forgotten.

There’s a serendipity to opening a binder (much like a cookbook) and flipping the pages, happening upon something sumptuous — something that just doesn’t exist when having to turn floppy magazine or newspaper clippings, one-by-one, in a file folder, carefully assuring that the whole pile doesn’t fall off your lap. Recipes encased in sheet protectors, clipped into binders, are both more functional and more given to yielding inspiration.

Cooks are also more likely to stop to consider whether a new recipe is deserving of joining a binder, whereas someone using a filing system might just throw a new clipping into a folder, leading to another build-up of never-used recipes. If file folders work for you, embrace them, but I’m on Team Recipe Binder.

Now, on to the digital discussion.

PAPER VS. DIGITAL RECIPES? 

Before we look at how to create a digital recipe collection, it’s important to understand why you might choose to stick with a paper system, move to digital, or embrace a hybrid approach. In part, it depends on what format of recipes you already have. If most are in hardcover cookbooks, the effort to organize individual recipes is different from what it would be if you mostly have loose clippings or even random digital versions.

Advantages using a paper recipe collection:

  • No learning curve — If your recipes are already on paper, you can sort and organize them quickly and easily in your physical space without needing any new skills. Let’s face it, if you can play Gin Rummy or parcel out the mail to the right person in your household, you can sort your paper recipes and organize them (as described in last week’s post). Conversely, organizing recipes digitally will require you to use basic computer or smartphone skills; if you don’t already have those skills or don’t want to learn them, paper might be better for you, at least for now.
  • No technology required, Part 1 —You don’t have to keep a digital tool (computer, phone, or tablet) in your cooking space, where things can get wet and/or sticky.
  • No technology required, Part 2 — Cooks whose recipe collections are solely on paper aren’t dependent upon electricity, internet, or Wi-Fi. If you tend to cook in a rustic old cabin, or your home is far from cell towers or internet service, paper might be better for you than digital. 
  • Nostalgia makes some meals taste better — There’s a sense of warm wistfulness when you cook with a recipe card written by your great-grandmother. If that means something to you, you may not get as excited about organizing your recipes digitally.

Photo by Ekaterina Bolovsova 

Moving from a paper recipe collection to one that is all digital has a different set of advantages:

  • Digital recipes are accessible from anywhere — If you visit your adult children across the country, you can pull up your child’s favorite cake recipe and share it with their spouse in a matter of seconds. (Do not malign the spouse’s cooking skills. That’s a no-no!)
  • You can share digital recipes easily — If someone wants to try making your favorite recipe, there’s no hand-copying or searching for a scanner. Opt for texting, tweeting, or (if you’re in the same space and both iOS users) Airdrop.
  • You can eliminate all the recipe clutter from your home once you go digital — So many of my clients are eager to downsize in retirement but are overwhelmed by how they’ll fit their cookbook collection and piles of recipes in a much smaller kitchen space. Going digital means they don’t have to worry.
  • Recipes won’t get misplaced, Part 1 — With a paper system, there’s always a chance for human error and sliding a recipe back into the wrong space, but if your recipes are on the computer or in the cloud, they’re backed up. (You do regularly and automatically back up your computer, right? If not, be sure to check out Paper Doll’s Ultimate Stress-Free Backup Plan.)
  • Recipes won’t get misplaced, Part 2 — Search is magical. Whether you’re doing a simple search of your computer or a fancy-pants Boolian search with lots of “this ingredient AND that ingredient BUT NOT this other ingredient” options, digitizing your recipes makes it easier to find what you want.
  • You can add/create recipes in more ways (again, without clutter) — There are so many ways to add recipes to your digital collection through various digital capturing methods:
    • Photograph or scan the recipe via an app
    • Use a traditional scanner
    • Use the Web Clipper in Evernote (of which, more later) or a similar capture method in a recipe-specific app.
    • Accept a shared recipe via Airdrop, email, or texting to get it into your digital space and then move it where you want it to live.
    • Type a recipe from scratch (or even handwrite it into your phone or tablet with a stylus or Apple pencil). This works whether you’re copying an old recipe or creating a new one.
    • Dictate the recipe into your computer or mobile device using the built-in dictation system.

What about a hybrid system?

There’s no reason that you have to choose between paper and digital recipes. If you’re feeling iffy about a move to a digital collection, but are overwhelmed by all of the paper recipes you have right now, explore baby steps toward getting comfortable going digital.

For example, you could keep your cookbooks, but start transitioning your clippings and loose recipes to a digital system. Or, you could begin a practice of backing up all of the family favorite recipes to digital so that all of your adult children (or grandchildren) can impress their friends and make those beloved dishes year-round, not only when you’re all together. (Trust me, a recipe will be just as delicious even if it’s not limited to once a year.)

YOU COULD START WITH A BASIC DIGITAL RECIPE FOLDER SYSTEM

In a comment on last week’s post, my colleague Sabrina Quairoli mentioned her approach:

Some years ago, I decided to get rid of my paper binders and go digital with those recipes. I scanned them using the Tinyscanner app and saved them in a folder by the recipe’s name. It works great, and I still pull from these recipes every so often.

A digital recipe filing system like Sabrina’s is similar to a recipe binder or file folder system. It allows you to “file” your recipes into digital folders by category, such as “meat entrées” or “desserts” with little muss or fuss. Whatever category you might have in a tangible system can work in a digital one.

Whether your recipe files are on your computer or in a cloud-based system like Google Drive, you get to create basic categories, and then use the search function to find recipes by keywords in their names as well as content in the saved files, dates created/modified, and so on, as with all computer files. The learning curve here is low; anyone who already saves files and knows how to search them can use this method. 

UPGRADE AND ORGANIZE YOUR RECIPES WITH EVERNOTE

As an Evernote Certified Expert, this upgrade is my favorite option to recommend to clients who are tech-inclined. There’s a slightly steeper learning curve (but you can build up to mastery, starting with skills you already have).

Evernote is a step-up for cooks who already have recipes in any digital format, like Word or Google docs stored on their computers or in cloud accounts, as well as recipes in any kind of digital note app, photo app, or scanned files. But with Evernote, you have some extra advantages over other digital systems.

Capture

Cooks can use all of the methods I described above (scan, type, record, etc.) to get a recipe into Evernote, but the platform has some additional goodies:

  • Record recipes verbally — If the elder chef in the family isn’t much for writing down the ingredient measurements or instructions, you can just tap and record as they cook, creating a legacy recording of what they’re saying and any questions or observances you make as they work. This is a fun, interesting alternative to using the dictation function.
  • YouTube — Evernote has a nifty feature where, if you put a YouTube link into a note, instead of just being able to see and click the link, the entire video appears. If you’ve got a favorite recipe you’ve watched on a YouTube cooking channel, you can capture and watch the entire video right from your note, then type as you watch to add ingredients (so you can make a shopping list) and note any vital instructions.
  • Autocapture — If you’re not so adept at taking close-up photos or scanning with your phone’s camera, Evernote has you covered. You can set your in-app camera to Auto mode, then hold the phone steady over any recipe or card so that the edges of the paper are visible inside the frame. Evernote’s camera will automatically detect, focus, and take a great snapshot of your recipe. (See below. Note: there’s no audio.)

  • Web Clipper — Customize how you capture a recipe. One of the nifty things about the web clipper (available on all the major browsers, like Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox, Opera, Microsoft Edge for Windows 10+) is that you can choose how much of a page you want.

Have you noticed how much extraneous material is on some web pages, especially those with recipes, like ads, pop-ups, navigation panels, etc.? The Evernote Web Clipper lets you choose how you want a page clipped. There’s Article (the main section of the page), Simplified Article (which removes ads, formatting, and layouts), Full Page (a copy of everything in the window, Bookmark (a link with a thumbnail photo), and PDF. 

  • Create your own recipes as new notes — In addition to all of the creative methods, there’s also the standard one of typing your recipe in. Initially, I was going to tell you that Evernote has stellar templates — just create a new note, give it a title, and instead of writing in the body of the note, click “Open Gallery” to select a template. 

But I was surprised to learn that right now, there are no recipe templates (although there is one for menu planning). As I started writing this post, I texted my colleague Kimberly Purcell, whose entire business, Amethyst Productivity, focuses on Evernote training.

Kimberly is a foodie and cook (and her husband is even a professional chef!), so I turned to her the other day and challenged her to design a recipe template for the new section of templates created by Evernote Experts. So, if you’re an Evernote user already, when that template pops up someday soon, you’ll know how it got there! 

Annotate and Add Materials

Evernote’s Web Clipper also lets you capture selected areas of a web page, which is great for those times when a site has multiple recipes on a page and you just want to capture that gorgeous Icebox Cake and not those Brussels Sprouts. You can change formatting (bold, italics, underline), font, and size of anything you input yourself, and you can choose highlight colors.

  • Customized Clips let you annotate your captured recipes. Evernote has annotation tools to let you add shapes, colors, and stamps (with text) to let you tweak a recipe you capture. You can annotate recipes whether you clip them with the Web Clipper or capture them through scanning, photos, or any other method. 
  • Add your own photos and comments to your recipe collection. — Not only can you save the photo from a cookbook, print, or online recipe, but you can add your own photos of how you’ve created, plated, and garnished a recipe. Then, whether you include text or annotation via Evernote’s tools, you can add your own notes to recipes you’ve acquired to say how you’ve tweaked it for your preferences, keeping the original and updates all visible but without clutter.

Tag Recipes to Increase Search Capabilities

The basic format of Evernote is to create notes and then related notes can be grouped into notebooks. However, there’s an additional system that allows you to create tags, like little sticky-note tabs, to connect recipes with important information.

So, you might have notebooks with all the general categories (appetizers, salads, entrées, desserts, etc.) we discussed last time. But then you can create much more granular notations with simple tags to label, and later find, any or all elements:

Cuisine/Ethnicity: Italian, Indian, Mexican, Chinese, Mediterranean, etc.

Diet Type: vegetarian, vegan, low-sodium, low carb, gluten-free, high protein/keto, kosher, halal, etc.

Meal experience: breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, dessert, sides, appetizers, beverages

Main ingredient: eggs, pasta, fish, chicken, beef, cheese, chocolate, etc.

Prep or Cooking Time (or separate tags for each): 10minutePrep, 30minutesPrep, 45MinuteCook, etc.

Cooking method (gadget or method): oven, stovetop, toaster oven, grill, crock pot, air fryer, Instant Pot, etc., or bake, fry, roast, slow cook, sheet pan, etc.

Holiday or seasonal item tags: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s, SuperBowl, picnics, barbecues, autumn soups, winter casseroles, etc.

Recipe origin — You might put the name of a cookbook or magazine, the name of the person who gave you the recipe, or note whether it’s a family legacy (on your side or your spouse’s side) recipe.

Family-specific tags — Whether someone loves or hates a recipe (or an ingredient) or is allergic, you can create whatever tags you like to quickly add or eliminate a recipe from a search.

Tagging is easy. Just click the tag icon when you create a recipe note; if you’re clipping a recipe with the Web Clipper, you’ll be offered a field to type tags. As you type, if you’ve already created a tag, it will auto-populate the field (just like when you type on Google).

Notes About Evernote Search

Organizational structure is always important. That said, whatever system you use, digital organization can be about more than hierarchy and structure because of the availability of search, and Evernote’s search is powerful. Beyond looking in a specific notebook, you can:

  • Use search if you can’t remember the exact recipe, but you know you have one that uses kale and cod, or chocolate and heavy cream. 
  • Use the optical character recognition aspect of Evernote’s search text in photos or scans of handwritten recipes. Seriously, if you scan in a photo, search can read and find text in the photo. As for handwriting, it does a better job with printing than cursive, but I’m impressed it can read my writing.
  • Use a combinations of tags to search for dinner recipes with a main ingredient of fish, made with a sheet pan, that you can finish in 20 minutes, and which does not include garlic. Or a kosher recipe for brunch that uses salmon and dill. Boolian search is mindblowing! 

As you know from last week’s post, Paper Doll is not much of a cook, but the leader of the Evernote Certified Expert, Brittany Naylor team does cook. Last year, she was interviewed by fellow Expert Vlad Campos on a few Evernote-related subjects, and provided a peek into her own  digital recipe collection, talking about how to Create A Smart and Beautiful Recipe Book on Evernote.

CONSIDER PINTEREST IF YOU PREFER VISUAL RECIPE ORGANIZATION

Not everyone wants to reinvent the recipe wheel. If most of your recipes come from food websites, recipe blogs, or social media, you can use Pinterest to save your recipes, as well as to search for recipes from within Pinterest (pinned by other users) that fit your interests. And then you can save other people’s recipes to your boards, too.

You’ll need to set up a Pinterest account, and then create boards for your overarching categories (like Dinners or beef recipes or cookies). If you’ve never used it, you can click on my Pinterest page to see all of the organizing (and other) boards I’ve created.

When you see a recipe you like on the web, simply click the “Pin” icon that hovers over most photos on the web, or use the share option on your mobile device or the pinning applet in your browser. 

Beyond boards, Pinterest has no complex structure, and your ability to provide keywords or tags is limited to the little comment field at the bottom of your pinned item. Think of it as the digital equivalent of clipping a recipe from a magazine, pinning it to a cork board, and writing a note in the margin.

So, you can’t be as granular or creative with tagging as you could be with Evernote, but if you prefer simplicity and a search as familiar as Google’s, Pinterest might be your preference. 

APPS FOR ORGANIZING RECIPES DIGITALLY (PREVIEW)

The above methods all use digital platforms that already exist for other purposes — computer files, Evernote notes, Pinterest pins — to organize the recipes you already have and the ones you want to collect in the future. But what if you want a system that was specifically developed for organizing recipes?

As you may have guessed, there’s an app for that.

Actually, there are dozens of apps for that. Next week, in the final installment of this recipe-oriented series, we’ll look at a number of recipe organizing apps — some that are famous and have been around for a long time, others that new but gathering steam. (And no, that wasn’t a cooking pun, unless you enjoyed it.) 

We’ll even revisit a fabulous app that helps you to index, discover, and organize your recipes with a bit of a social aspect.

So, be sure to put next week’s post on your colander calendar. Until then, keep planning your Thanksgiving week meals, and please let me know in the comments if you have a preferred method for organizing your recipes digitally.

Calm Cooking Chaos (Part 1): Organize Your Paper Recipes

Posted on: November 7th, 2022 by Julie Bestry | 16 Comments

The flip of the calendar page to November doesn’t just bring darker evenings and colder weather. The minute the Halloween candy left the store shelves, it was replaced with holiday ingredients. Minutes ago it was barely autumn and now we’re mere weeks from Thanksgiving, and you know what’s right around the corner after Turkey Day!

There’s never so much of a resurgence in interest in recipes — and recipe organizing — as during the approach of the holiday season. Clients start calling with a twinge of trepidation in their voices.

They’ve got decades of acquired cookbooks, recipe boxes filled with handwritten index cards, and mountains of recipes culled from magazines or printed from the internet. The desire to create a perfect family holiday is weighed down by the stress of recipe clutter.

And with some families, there’s a desire to create a culinary legacy, a way to pass down the favorite meals prepared for special times. For example this recent Washington Post piece, A Holocaust Survivor, A Rescued Family Cookbook, and the Taste of Home, reminds us of how important it is to be able to bring alive the favorite tastes of childhood.

THE COOK CONTINUUM

You might think this is only a problem for people who suffer with general household clutter, but I assure you recipe clutter is a problem all along the culinary continuum, from people who rely on PB&J skills (that would be Paper Doll) to lifelong cooks to professional chefs, and the existence of recipe clutter may or may not correlate with any other clutter in the home.

Sex and the City‘s Carrie Bradshaw famously kept her sweaters in the oven. Similarly, to Paper Mommy‘s distress, I’m really not inclined to cook, and if it requires more than boiling pasta and drizzling it with olive oil, I’m not going to do it. There’s only one “special” recipe I make when called upon to bring something to a potluck, Hello Dollies (also known as Magic Cookie Bars), the recipe for which has lived under a succession of magnets on my fridge for several decades. 

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have cookbooks or even individual recipes. I do, but they’re organized and out of the way. 

But even for non-cooks, cookbooks and loose recipes represent potential. Those glossy photos enchant us. We can imagine ourselves as Julia or Nigella or Ina, whipping up something fabulous.

For the same reason we read fashion magazines and follow tips on “how to turn a daytime look into an evening look” when our evening “look” is actually leggings and an oversized sweatshirt, we non-cooks collect recipes because they represent an imagined lifestyle.

Whether we’re the ones whipping up healthy and visually stunning recipes to delight our families and friends, or we imagine our butler Jeeves taking our recipe collection in hand, recipes seem like a more reasonable fantasy than jetting off to Paris or Madrid.

For those who actually do cook, whether a little or a lot, recipe clutter tends to expand over time. If you’re a good cook, people give you cookbooks as gifts. If you’re a good eater, people press their lovingly handwritten recipes into your palms at the end of dinner parties, believing their secret sauce will help you achieve your greatest dreams.

So no wonder, between our own inclinations to gather potentially delicious and delightful recipes and others’ penchants for sharing the magic with us, we all end up with more recipes than we will ever make, and that leads to clutter.

HOW TO PARE DOWN A COOKBOOK COLLECTION

Is your family food headquarters littered with clipped and copied recipes, cooking magazines, regular and diet-related cookbooks, and other detritus from the pandemic sourdough wars? It’s not just you. Kitchen clutter is often a sticky mess, preventing us from ever finding the perfect recipe when we want or need it.

The toys and clothes that surround us may no longer be age-, size-, or lifestyle-appropriate. Similarly, we can outgrow cookbooks, diets, and recipes that once fit us so well. You have probably accepted that it’s time to (amicably) part with Macrobiotics for a Groovy Life or 172 Ways To Lose Weight With Grapefruit.

Find all the tendrils of your sprawling cookbook collection.

Most people tend to treat their cookbooks as a separate entity from the rest of their personal libraries. They are content to keep their fiction and reference books on bookcases and shelves in their living rooms, family rooms, and bedrooms, in their reading nooks and wherever they cozy up to read.

But herein lies the first problem. If your cookbooks are far from where you cook, you’ll probably never use them. It’s not like there are miles between your living room and kitchen counter, but if your cookbooks are on the bookshelves two rooms over, unless you’re diligent about creating new menus, you’ll probably forget that you even have the cookbooks.

Conversely, if you follow the general organizing practice of keeping possessions where you use them and your cookbooks are in or near your kitchen, you’ve probably got sticky, sauce-stained, powdered sugar-covered pages piled on spare chairs and kitchen counters and inside cabinets. No matter how excited people are to cook, and then eat, their creations, most people aren’t that excited about tidying up.

Cookbook Photo by Alfred Kenneally on Unsplash

Even if we organizers persuade clients that dinner isn’t done until the dishes are washed and the leftovers are put away, that final step of wiping down spattered cookbooks and putting them back into the collection tends to be a bridge too far.

So, meet your cookbooks where they are. If there are too many to deal with all at once, start with the ones that constitute clutter, that live where they’ve been dropped, in and near the kitchen, and once you’ve reviewed them, then move on to making determinations about the ones that are tidily living (if forgotten) on your bookshelves.

Take one book at a time and ask yourself some important questions.

Have you ever used a recipe from this cookbook?

If you received a cookbook as a holiday present or for your birthday, you likely flipped through the book, perhaps looked at the Table of Contents, and then tucked the book away to clean up after all the wrapping paper was tidied away. Maybe you never looked at it at all.

Sometimes, we buy cookbooks because the cover or the author made the book tempting. A few years ago, Spoon University published a piece on The Hottest Male Chefs of All Time. I’m sure it sold cookbooks. But just because you love watching Jamie Oliver cook, melt over Gordon Ramsay yelling at his kitchen staff, or giggle over the performance stylings of Alton Brown, it doesn’t mean you’re ever going to prepare recipes from their collections. Let go of unread cookbooks!

Just because you love watching Jamie Oliver cook, melt over Gordon Ramsay yelling at his kitchen staff, or giggle over the performance stylings of Alton Brown does not mean you're ever going to prepare recipes from their collections.… Click To Tweet

As you go through your cookbooks, if you come across one you’ve never made even one recipe from, flip through the Table of Contents to get a sense of the chapters or categories. If you don’t see at least a handful of recipes you’d like to try — like in the next two weeks — it may be a sign that it’s time to set that cookbook free.

N/A

If a cookbook is a time-tested classic, like Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, Julie Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, or even a modern classic like Samsin Nosrat‘s Salt Fat Acid Heat and you consider yourself a shaky cook, you might find comfort in these standard-bearers.

N/A

But if you’ve got a big tome of recipes that you’ve never used, and you aren’t inspired by them? Buh-bye!

Have you used a recipe from this cookbook in the last few years?

I used to ask if you’d used recipes in the past year, but nothing about the past few years has been normal.

In quarantine, people cooked more, but they entertained less, and using only one year for a gauge isn’t helpful, just as the old rubric of determining wardrobe purging by whether we’ve worn it in the last year isn’t wise. (Has anyone worn a cocktail dress in the era of COVID?)

But if you pick up a cookbook and have fond (or not-so-fond) memories of what you used to make, but haven’t touched since your kids went off to college or you and your spouse opted for heart-healthy meals, that cookbook has overstayed its welcome.  

How many recipes from this cookbook do you ever actually use?

If you use the cookbook heavily, even in just one season, it makes sense to keep it and give it a place of pride in your eventual (but reduced) cookbook library.

However, if you seek the cookbook frequently but only for the same two or three recipes, copy out what you use and set the cookbook free. Next time, we’ll look at options for maintaining your recipes digitally, but for how, you have a few options:

  • Hand-copy the recipe to your paper system.
  • Photocopy the pages from the cookbook if you’ve got a home copier/scanner.
  • Scan the recipe (with your scanner, a scanning app on your phone, or even just the scan function in your phone’s camera), then store the recipe in a digital file. 

However, if you can’t remember the last time you opened it, the book has become a stranger in your home — send it away! 

Give the cookbook away. If you don’t cook, but someone you love does, gift it with the chiding stipulation that you’d love it if they’d invite you over when they make the soup on page 135 or the pastry on page 310. 

Donate the cookbook to your local library book sale or a book-related charity. See Ask Paper Doll: How And Where Can I Donate Lots of Books? for guidance. See if your local middle or high school has a Home Economics department (though they are vanishingly rare) that wants cookbooks or leave them in a Free Little Library.

Sell it at a local used book store or online. If your cookbooks are vintage, make up an inventory and inquire about selling them at Blackbird Cookbooks or even open your own Etsy shop. For a behind-the-scenes look at vintage cookbook sales, Taste recently published Vintage Cookbook Collecting Is Often Kind, Sometimes Cutthroat, and Now Extremely Online

Store it elsewhere than your kitchen. If you can’t bring yourself to let go of some cookbooks, whether because they’re gorgeous and or because they represents family history, and you have the bookshelf space elsewhere in your home, store extraneous ones as you would history or reference texts.

Prevent cookbook clutter in the future.

Test-drive a cookbook to see if it’s a good fit by borrowing it from friends or the library before making a purchase. Set aside a newly gifted cookbook where you can easily review it. If there’s nothing that inspires you to cook it (as opposed to inspiring fantasies of an Instagram photo showing you have cooked it), return the gift.

(Once you write the thank you note, a gift is yours. Do with it as you would if you bought something for yourself and later realized you didn’t want it!) 

If you feel like you must store your active cookbooks in the kitchen, create dedicated storage where you can maintain your cookbooks upright. That might be in an unused cabinet or shelf, or you might want to invest in creating a cookbook box or drawer, building shelves, or creating a display area. For some ideas, peruse:

Food 52’s Clever Ways to Store Your Many, Many Cookbooks

The Spruce’s 15 Stylish Cookbook Display and Storage Ideas

HOW TO PARE DOWN A LOOSE RECIPE COLLECTION

Cookbooks are hard to part with because they’re fancy. Someone went to the effort of writing and collecting the recipes, taking photos, and the editing and publishing it. It’s easy to see how all that expended effort makes it hard to discard a book from your collection. 

But what about the piles of loose recipes clipped out of magazines or copied after tasting a friend’s culinary triumph? They still represent potential, just as cookbooks do, but they’re usually a little easier to discard.

Unless you’re a beginner, you’re not going to tackle all of your recipes in one sitting. Instead, try to gather your recipes of similar types. Aim to deal with loose recipe pages first; later on you can tackle index cards that are banded or boxed together, or recipes already gathered in notebooks using the same process.

Select one recipe at a time and follow these simple rules:

Sift for gold.

When you pick up a recipe page, especially one clipped from a magazine, your first task may be to figure out what you were saving. If there were multiple recipes in an article on a particular theme, you may have been endeavoring to downsize your magazine collection and just clipped all the recipe pages to make a fast getaway.

Photo by Klaus Nielsen

When you find a recipe, identify whether it’s actually a masterpiece or a reproduction. Do you need yet another recipe for chocolate chip cookies or smoothies or meatloaf?

Is there anything special about this recipe? Did you clip it because you were hungry when you were reading the magazine? Or because the magazine’s production team made the glossy photo look gorgeous? (Do your creations ever look like the food in magazines?) Did you clip the recipe because it was created by a popular chef on TV?

If a recipe truly still appeals to you, keep it; otherwise, set it free.

Separate dreams from reality.

Friend, I ask you, will you ever really cook this?

We have to be honest with ourselves and realize that if the fanciest thing we cook is spaghetti, we’re not really going to be dabbling in egg drop soup or meringue flambé from scratch.

If your lifestyle is such that you, your spouse, and your kids aren’t home until 15 minutes before stomachs start rumbling, recipes that require all-day attention just won’t fit your lifestyle.

If the recipes (or, more likely, the photos with those recipes) are truly dazzling but out of your reach, create a “Dream Recipes” folder to keep in your files along with dream vacations and dream decorating ideas. You can preserve the dream without cluttering your kitchen.

If the photos with those recipes are truly dazzling but out of your reach, create a Dream Recipes folder to keep in your files along with dream vacations & decorating ideas. You can preserve the dream without cluttering your… Click To Tweet

Divide and conquer.

Once you’ve managed to reduce your recipe pile from a mountain to a bundt cake-sized mole hill, sort your recipes into categories. Ask, under what meaningful category does this recipe fall?

By meaningful, I mean meaningful to you and your family. Pretend you’re a cookbook editor and come up with some major categories, and then add the ones that fit your family’s dining style. For example:

  • Appetizers — if you’re the type to design charcuterie (warning: you will salivate when exploring that page) or have jumped into the viral trend of butter boards, and your pre-dinner delights are more hors d’oeuvres than string cheese and potato chips, gather your inspiration here.
  • Salads
  • Entrées
  • Side Dishes
  • Desserts
  • Holiday recipes and menus — think: family traditions by holiday and celebrations, with each  family member’s favorites
    • Birthdays 
    • Hanukkah
    • Christmas
    • Passover
    • Easter
    • Independence Day picnics
    • Sporting event tailgates
  • Ethnic dishes, subdivided by world region, if you don’t blend them into your other categories
  • Specialty recipes for family members with dining limitations — vegetarian, vegan, allergy-free, gluten-free, etc.

Once you have a healthy stack for each category (and are certain you’re really going to attempt to cook each item), you’re ready for the final step.

“Publish” your own cookbook.

Buy a fat (2″ or 3″) three-ring (D-ring) binder notebook or several 1″ binders, depending on your preference, and a box of transparent, plastic sheet protectors.

N/A

Slide each recipe into a sheet protector. If a recipe is continued on the back of a page, you’ll be able to see the front and reverse easily; if the recipe is continued on another page, place it back to back with the prior page. For recipes that are only on one page, you can arrange two recipes back-to-back.

If you’re happy with recipes on index cards and have a preferred metal or wooden index box, stick with it, but to blend your recipe cards with the binder system, you can purchase recipe card sheet protectors in 3″ x 5″ or larger sizes.

Why else do you want a sheet protector? You will not want to punch holes in each of your recipe sheets before putting them in your binder, and you won’t want to deal with ripped edges/holes of often-used recipe sheets.

The sheet protectors keep the recipes from getting damaged or sticky and can be easily cleaned with a sponge.

If you’re keeping multiple categories in one binder, label simple subject dividers to separate the categories. I find clients prefer hard plastic dividers and use my label maker to create clear and uniform labels.

N/A

Alternatively, you can use adhesive index tabs. Post-it has some nice versions in primary colors and richer assorted colors.

N/A

3-ring binders come with clear front panels. Slide a yummy photo into the front panel to make it look snazzy. Similarly, most binders have a stiff, removable piece of paper under the plastic spine; remove it to decorate and/or label it before reinserting. Alternatively, just stick a label right on the binder’s spine.

For an upgrade that’s still DIY, the Cookbook People specializes in personalizable binders and labels. Taste of Home Magazine recently published 15 of the Prettiest Recipe Books You Can Buy, and The Spruce Eats reviewed The 8 Best Recipe Organizers in 2022. The Kate Spade recipe binder in multiple styles seems to be a favorite, but I find the version listed in both articles to be garish and extra-pricey. Not that my preference matters, but I prefer this lemony version.

N/A

Check the measurements of any recipe binder you purchase; the binder needs to meet or exceed the length and width of any recipe page you have. Most magazines are just about 8 1/2″ x 11″, the same size as the copy paper onto which you might print a recipe from the web; larger magazines like Real Simple are 9″ x 11″. However, some pre-made recipe binder kits can be shorter and/or narrower, leaving recipes sticking out.

Preserve the family recipes you love — and actually use — in a way that’s handy, organized, and easy to keep intact. If paper is your preferred method, these tips with keep you afloat through the holidays and for all cooking seasons. 

However, if digital is more your style, next week’s post will offer more modern, sharable options for organizing and accessing your favorite recipes.

How do you keep your family recipes?

« Older Entries