recipe overload...solved.

So over the last few weeks, I've been thinking about how to make my weekly meal planning go a little faster.  In this previous post of our Pinterest dinner week, you already know that we have a dinner board of what we're eating every night and I try and shop on Sundays for everything we need. 

Well...getting the shopping list together can sometimes take me a while. I usually drag out all of our favorite cookbooks and look online for various ideas and 2 hours later I'll have our weekly menu set. I just knew there was a way to cut out some of this "what should we eat this week" kind of time - and I think I've finally found a solution! I've been searching Pinterest for various ideas and ended up creating my own {simple & quick} way to organize all of the recipes that we've really enjoyed.  

Some of you may actually have a system like this in place. It's not fancy or expensive, but hopefully it'll be efficient! The whole idea is to be able to go to one location, flip through cards to choose meals for the week, find the recipe immediately, and add what we need to the grocery list. So, here's what I did:

First, I dragged out various cookbooks and opened my Pinterest board titled "Been There, Made That" with all the yummy dishes we've made. Then I started to go through each book/board and write down the name of the recipe on a notecard, making a note of the page number and where the recipe came from. 

Then I sorted the cards into like-recipes: appetizers, desserts, meatless mains, soups/stews, etc. and got a mini expandable file and labeled the tabs accordingly. 

Of course the file folder needed a label and BAM. There you have it. I can't WAIT to use it to plan next week's meals. 

On a related note, I thought I'd share our super cute recipe box that my extremely thoughtful SIL Andrea gave me at my family bridal shower.  All the women in my family brought a (personalized!) recipe card filled out with a dish of their choice so I could have some great ideas!  How awesome is that?

How do you organize your recipes?