Simplify Meal Planning with a DIY Recipe Binder

Step inside any kitchen and you’re bound to find a shelf of cookbooks. You’ll probably also find a drawer of recipe cards or magazine clippings. And if you ask, there’s probably a Pinterest board full of recipes, too. Plus if you end up living with someone else who cooks, you’ve doubled your collection. So.many.recipes! But out of all those options, you might have a handful of go-to recipes that frequent your menu rotation. This is why I started my DIY recipe binder shortly after my husband and I moved into our current house. Unfortunately this isn’t a one and done kind of project; BUT it does give you a place to start building from and an easy system for taming the physical and mental chaos that is meal planning.

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But Do I Really Need ANOTHER Recipe Book?

Short answer: No. You don’t need it.

My answer: Yes.

• Do you get stuck in the rut of making the same recipes week after week?
• Do you enjoy cooking but don’t have the time to track down all the new recipes you want to try (and somehow manage to make sure you have all the random ingredients?) Just ask me about the bottle of Fish oil that’s been hanging out in my fridge for waaayy too long.
• Have you doctored up an old recipe just to your liking but now you’re the only one who can make it because it lives in your head?
• Do you have a Pinterest board with about 200 recipes to try? Or maybe you already tried them – but did you like them? Were they just too much? (How can you keep track?!)

If your answer to any of those is “Yes” – or if you have to think about it for more than a second – then you NEED this diy recipe binder. Like pronto. (BTW – if you answered “No” and you really have it together in the kitchen…you deserve a gold star. ⭐️ And perhaps you should share your tips with the rest of us in a later post!)

Benefits of Your DIY Recipe Binder

You might still be on the fence thinking to yourself that it doesn’t take that long to find your go-to recipes when you’re meal planning or actually doing the cooking. And you already have your favorites marked anyways. And you can google the rest. Maybe that’s true. But I still recommend some sort of diy recipe binder based on my own experience.

Only Search Your Favorite Recipes

Raise your hand if you have at least one cookbook that you keep around because it has that one recipe in it. (Or maybe you’re really nostalgic and you have a stack of Taste of Home magazines somewhere with a bunch of dog-eared corners. Do people still even get magazines?! 🙃)

Do yourself a favor and take some advice from Elsa – Let it go! You do not need to dedicate precious space in your life to an entire book (or shelf of books) for just a few recipes. And you definitely don’t need to waste space for recipes that weren’t great or you just didn’t like. Weed them out – if it wasn’t great the first time, chances are you’re probably not going to make it again any time soon.

Meal Plan in No Time

How would you like to plan next week’s menu in about 10 minutes?

YOU CAN! When all your recipes are in one place, and you know they’re all delish (because of the section above – Only Search Your Favorites), and you probably already have most of the ingredients on-hand (again, favorite recipes), you can plan an entire week’s worth of meals in 10 minutes – maybe less!

Now I find that having an idea or theme for the week helps with this part. Once you have a general idea (think “I’ll make soup on Monday and use the CrockPot on Wednesday.”), just flip through your binder and pick what you need for the week. Update your grocery order (or actually go to the store 😳) and Voila! (Just don’t lose motivation and forget to actually cook it – planning and prepping are two very different activities.)

Save Yourself Time, Money, & Space

It might not seem significant; however, by building up your diy recipe binder, you get more than just another recipe book.

Your new recipe binder will save you time – no more flipping through recipe after recipe just to find one that might be good.

You will save money – you are more likely to have the ingredients on hand for your favorite recipes and won’t need to buy ingredients that will only get used once.

Your new binder will save you space – once you pull your favorite recipes from all your current books, you can donate them or share with a friend so they have a second life.

These changes may seem insignificant at first; however, the benefits do add up. Once you have your binder setup, you’ll have an easy resource to use – for meal planning, party/holiday prep, and even sharing recipes.

My DIY Recipe Binder Tips

I am not one for having a lot of “extras” around the house, so the benefits I highlighted above were a no brainer. However, once I really started using it, I found a few other tips that made it even more helpful.

1. I can add notes about how many servings we get from each recipe – for the meal and leftovers.
2. If I happen to be tracking my macros at the time, I can calculate the nutrition for the recipe and have the numbers ready to go.
3. I know which recipes can be made in advance. Some things just do not thaw well so there’s no need to include those in my freezer-meal prep.
4. I can keep track of which recipes are favorites for our family. (Makes it very easy to pick a special treat for birthdays!)

Setting Up Your DIY Recipe Binder

At this point you might be looking for a tutorial on exactly how to setup your own binder.

You don’t need my instructions! The point is to make something that works for you. My setup went something like this:

• Dig out old binders from the closet.
  • I use one for my “regular” recipes and one for my baking recipes.
• Buy sheet protectors and tab dividers.
  • Using sheet protectors means you can easily wipe your recipes off if you’re a messy cook.
  • These tab dividers are great – the labels are big enough to read and the pockets help store recipes until you’ve tested them or are ready to file them.
• Decide on categories and make labels.
  • Click here to see the categories I use!
• Start adding recipes.
  • You can copy them by hand, slide the recipe into the sheet protector, or retype them all into the same format. (Guess which option my perfectionist side chose… 😉)

The end. See? It doesn’t have to be hard – it just has to make sense for you. And if you already have all your recipes in one place, you’re well on your way to having a diy recipe binder that works for you.

Tell me what you think! Is this something you already do or plan to try? Maybe you have a better solution – be sure to share in the comments!