The method to my madness...

I have a problem. I'm certain that I need a 12-step program. I subscribe to every food magazine under the sun. I love to read them, pile them up, read them again, pile them up.... you get the picture.

A while back, I bought this handy basket which I keep in the kitchen. It's stuffed to the brims (and until recently, overflowing!) with food magazines. A few months back, I decided enough was enough - I HAD to trim the basket down to magazines 1 yr old or less. *SIGH* I have magazines from 2006 in this pile.

So I had to figure out what exactly to do with all of the recipes I wanted to try. I finally decided on a method of folders. It was around back to school time, so I got a pile of them for dirt cheap and labeled each with a meat type (beef, pork, turkey, etc) or a course (dessert, appetizer, drinks, and so on).

Then I set off on the daunting task of actually pulling and sorting recipes. I go through magazines and pull out recipes that I might want to try at some point in time. Then I file them. If they have two pages, I staple them together. If there are 2 recipes on a page I want to try, I cut them apart (unless they can be filed in the same folder).

Sorting them by food type/course is extremely helpful to me. When chicken is on sale, I grab the chicken folder and find a recipe. When I'm looking for a veggie, I grab the veggie folder, pull a recipe that looks good and move on.

So this is what I'm up to today!! If you have a method for sorting recipes, I'd love to see/hear about it! Happy recipe hunting :)