Parent Hacks

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Store seasonal recipes and serving pieces in the same place

in: Food & Mealtime, Holidays & Special Occasions

Amazon: Wilson Jones Resource 3-Ring Recycled Binder, 1 Inch Capacity"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

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About Asha Dornfest

Asha Dornfest is a writer, parent, and insistent optimist living in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of PARENT HACKS, co-author of MINIMALIST PARENTING, and co-host of the Edit Your Life podcast.

Comments

  1. adrienne says

    December 14, 2011 at 1:08 pm

    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.

  2. Asha Dornfest says

    December 15, 2011 at 12:08 am

    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.

  3. Laura, easy recipes cook says

    December 17, 2011 at 11:57 am

    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!

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About the Author

Asha Dornfest is an author, optimist, and mom of two. She started the Parent Hacks blog in 2005, and turned it into a book in 2016. More about Asha »

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