Do you want to get more organized with meal planning? Creating a personalized cookbook of recipes is a great way to make your meal planning process faster and easier. I’ll show you how in this step-by-step guide!
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One of the biggest issues people tell me they have with meal planning is how much time and effort it takes them to look for recipes each week.
Creating a collection of your family’s favorite recipes can make the process so much easier! And having them all printed out and organized in a cookbook that you can have at your fingertips makes it even better.
No more creating a meal plan and then forgetting where you saw the recipe for one of the meals! No more endless scrolling through Pinterest trying to come up with dinner ideas.
Invest a couple of hours into creating and organizing a printed cookbook of your favorite recipes (I’ll tell you how step-by-step in this post!) and you’ll have a tool that will make meal planning simple and quick every week. You can easily add to this cookbook as you find new recipes that you love, too.
What You’ll Need to Create Your Own Cookbook
You’ll just need a few items to create your own cookbook, and you may have most of them in the house already!
- A 3-Ring Binder (I used 1-inch)
- Binder Dividers with Tabs
- A Printer and paper
- A 3-hole punch
- Your favorite recipes
To help you make your cookbook beautiful and organized, I’ve created a Printable Recipe Binder Kit that is available in my shop. It comes with a cover for your cookbook, divider tabs and table of contents for each section of your cookbook, recipe card, meal planning worksheet, grocery list and 5 recipes to get you started.
Step 1: Put Together Your Cookbook
Take your 3-ring binder and add the divider tabs. You’ll need to decide what sections you want in your cookbook. Dinners will probably be your biggest section, but you can also add sections for breakfast, meal prepping, desserts, snacks or whatever you need!
I added a cute cover to my cookbook and each of the sections, as well as a table of contents that I can add to as I go. If you want to use the printables I’ve created, they are available in my shop!
Step 2: Gather and Print Your Favorite Recipes
This is the most time-consuming part of getting all your recipes organized, but it’s so worth it! You probably have lots of recipes that you’ve tried from blogs or cookbooks that you’ve forgotten about. Check out your saved recipes on Pinterest, flip through some cookbooks or find your family recipes.
Print out all of your favorite recipes for each of the categories you decided on. You can also use recipe cards to write down family recipes or recipes from cookbooks.
Helpful Tip: Most blogs and recipe websites have a “print recipe” button that will give you a neat and clean recipe card to print out. If you like, you can scale it to fit onto one or two pages if it isn’t already.
Step 3: Add Your Recipes to Your Cookbook
Once your recipes are printed, use a 3-hole punch to punch holes in each sheet of paper and add them to the correct sections of your cookbook.
To help you find your recipes easily when you are cooking, I recommend organizing each section alphabetically. I added a table of contents list in the front of each section to help me easily find a recipe. I used a pen to write the page numbers at the bottom of each recipe.
How to Use Your Cookbook for Meal Planning
Pick a day and time to meal plan for the upcoming week. You can write down your meal plan on a piece of paper to hang on your fridge, put it in your planning, write it on your phone or whatever works for you.
My Recipe Binder Kit includes a meal planning worksheet and grocery list that you can use each week to plan your meals. Or grab these free meal planning printables!
Flip through your recipe binder (or just look at the table of contents if you created one) and choose your recipes for the week based on what ingredients you have in the house, what’s on sale at your grocery store or what you are craving.
You’ll be able to quickly flip to each recipe you chose to check what ingredients you need to add to your grocery list.
Keep your cookbook in the kitchen so that when it’s time to make each meal, you can pull it out and easily flip to the recipe.
Get a Printable Kit to Help You Create a Pretty and Organized Recipe Binder!
I’ve created a printable kit that you can use to put together a recipe binder that is both well organized AND pretty! You can find the kit in my shop. It contains a cover and tabs for your binder, table of contents pages, a recipe card, grocery list, meal planning worksheet and 5 recipes to help you get started.
Need More Meal Planning Help?
Meal planning is one of my favorite things to talk about on my blog and I’ve got several posts that you will find helpful if you are wanting to learn more.
Read about how I saved $200 a month by meal planning in this post! If you are just getting started with meal planning, learn my method in Meal Planning 101.
Need some recipe ideas? I’m always sharing my finds on Pinterest and Instagram. You can also check out our current dinner rotation to see what my favorites are.
Did you make your own recipe binder?
I want to see your recipe binders! Once you put together your binder, take some pictures or videos and share to social media. Be sure to tag me @asavoryfeast and hashtag #asavoryfeast so I can see how your binder turned out.
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