let's get cookin'

I have always had a passion for food & a good family meal.  I grew up not going to restaurants on weeknights or much at all (except for vacations & special occasions) and having home cooked meals at home every night!  When I lived at home, my mom cooked us breakfast in the mornings, packed my lunch for school, and cooked a gourmet meal for the family every night.  I would say that in this sense, I was spoiled. :)  Now, when it's time for a family birthday or get together, we are a lot more likely to meet at my parents house than go out to a restaurant.  

I am also not picky at all.  We always tried different foods, were exposed to variant flavors, and tried to eat healthily.  I can remember tasting cows tongue in New York, Escargot in New Orleans, and most recently some sort of Livers in Spain (Ben's family was nowhere near ordering that dish)... For a while now, I have said that the only foods I don't like are peanuts, coffee, and yellow mustard.  While those are all 3 very popular items, they are really the main things I don't so much care for.  I'm willing to try anything!  

My mom has an extremely massive cookbook collection and cooked a lot of our meals from Cooking Light.  She has also helped compile & print 2 different cookbooks.  One for a medical society and the other is the "Setzler Family Cookbook." Most of our favorite family recipes are in there, and cooked frequently, and I also got a subscription to Cooking Light when I was in college.  Through the years my collection of recipes has grown as well, but I don't like to keep the whole magazine once I have cooked from it.  Instead, I ripped out the recipes I like and throw the magazine away.  Now, with the popularity of the internet, many recipes I get from blogs, emails, or websites, I print out to cook from.  My stack of pages became too much and every time I tried to find a particular recipe, I had to search through hundreds of pages to find THAT one.  

My mom had a similar problem, and several months ago she came up with a solution to the disorganized stack of paper.  Being an organizational freak, in turn, this week I followed suit and copied her idea.  

My very own binder cookbook:

The process was actually pretty easy and not as time consuming as I thought it would be.  Here is a cell phone picture of the process of separating all the different kinds of recipes into individual stacks (basics like chicken, pork, beef, appetizers, desserts, etc)

Then I found a "D ring" binder that I wasn't using in our office.  I purchased 24 extra large color coded dividers and a package of 200 sheet protectors.  Off to work I went... Putting all the recipes in the plastic sheet protectors behind the individual categories (in alphabetical order of course)... 

I printed the category labels and a cute little title page with a fun font and a cupcake I found from "Fonts for Peas".

It's quite thick but really easy to use!  I have already cooked from it this week, quickly finding what I needed from the "fish," "sides," and "sauces" tabs. 

Whether it's fun recipes I haven't tried yet but want to soon, ripped from an old Cooking Light cookbook...

Or recipes my sister has shared on her blog and I printed out, even with calories per serving already figured out! 

Everything is in there and so easy to find!  I went through a cooking lull for a while there, but the past 2 weeks I have been cooking more regularly.  I think this new book is going to help make it easier as well!  Ben will thank me :)

Happy Cooking!