"Store like with like" is a classic organizing principle. Here's how Erin uses it to simplify holiday meal preparation:
Most of us have a roasting pan or other serving vessel that only comes out for the holidays. Store all your holiday recipes in there and you won't have to dig around your recipe folders to find them. If there's a recipe you use year-round and also at holidays, make an extra copy of the recipe and store it with your "holiday" stash.
If you don't have dedicated holiday cookware or serving pieces, you could accomplish something similar with a 3-ring binder filled with dividers and page protectors (I like heavyweight page protectors and dividers with write-on tabs). Create a section for (or devote a whole binder to) holiday recipes, and store the binder with your cookbooks.
For those with digital recipe collections, a "holiday" tag or category would do the trick.
How do you keep track of your favorite holiday recipes?
More: Hacks for the holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas and Hanukkah
Most of what I make is either in a cookbook, a family recipe (in the box of recipe cards), or from our subscription menu service (http://babytoolkit.blogspot.com/2009/01/dinner-renaissance-how-relish-changed.html). I’m too GenX to convert pages from magazines or full page print-offs into recipe cards, and I’m not much for scanning stuff for electronic files.
So, next to my cookbooks (many of which have favorite recipes marked with post-it flags) I keep a magazine file box where I put any recipe I want to keep. I used to have a 3-ring binder, but everything ended up in the end pockets “to be filed.”
It’s an ugly fix, but it works for me.
Good point, Adrienne. Sometimes it feels like too much to stuff those recipes into dividers! But it sure is nice to have them in a usable, portable system.
One can scan their recipe collection and make it digital as images, instead of typing up each one. Save it on a CD and give it as gifts to family and friends. You know you will have a way to find a lost recipe!