Prepare Today Homemade-Recipe Binder

This post isn't exactly a recipe, but it has to do with recipes. I have been organizing and cleaning my home for the last few weeks.  I love the feeling of clearing out the things we don't use and opening up free space in my home. {not to be filled with new stuff}  The organization has spread all the way into my kitchen and all of my recipes.  I have a confession, I love binders!  I have a binder to organize quite a few things in my home. So it felt natural to want a binder of all of my food storage recipes, categorized in a tabbed, organized binder. So I spent the afternoon clipping and hole punching my way to an organized food storage recipe binder.  :)

I first had to make a cover, you don't have too, I just felt it needed a cute cover. Then I added tabs for every major food storage category. 

{Wheat, Beans, Rice, Pasta, Oats, Dessert, Mixes, Sun Oven Cooking, Dinner in a Jar/Bag, Potatoes, Vegetables, Protein/Eggs, Tortillas, and an Index}

I didn't do a fruit or powdered milk category because I didn't have enough recipes to fill those.  They will get categorized into other tabs. 

Of course I had to add a picture for each category :)

Then I started adding all the recipes that I have collected from magazines, notebooks, cookbooks, and the internet, and now they are all in one location.  I added an index in the back because I wanted to be able to look up an item, say Mexican dishes, and find all the recipes that had Mexican food in them.  Some of my indexed items are powdered milk, cream cheese, chicken, zucchini, etc.  Some of the recipes had crossover items like rice, tortillas, chicken and beans and I wanted to be able to find them.  {do I sound insane yet?}  But it feels so great to have this done! 

Even though I am prepared my kids and husband really don't know where I keep all of our food in the storage room, and I joke that if something happened to me they would starve.  So I showed my husband the binder and said:  "If I should die before I wake, now you'll know what to bake."  He wasn't sure if that was suppose to be funny or not :)  All I know is if we had to evacuate our home this binder will be on my lap in the car, hehe :)


Our 3-month goal this month is to organize our kitchens and pantries.  This is a great way to accomplish the goal. You can make a binder or just keep a notebook of the recipes that you find your family enjoys.  Sometimes little things can help in a big way!