The Chicago trip went well and it was great to have my bestest friend from childhood stay with me at my mom's. Cath wanted to organize her recipes so she brought them along. All I added to the effort was to provide an air-conditioned room and make a couple of suggestions.
Cath honestly cooks a lot, so finding her recipes quickly is very important. Like most of us, she clips and saves recipes "to try" but these do add up. One of her resolutions at the end of the process was to avoid clipping any more recipes for quite a while.
So, first she took the recipes out of the double sided recipe box created by her elder son. She recycled about half of these recipes. She now has space in the wooden box to add tested "favorites."
Next, she went through her piles of recipes to try and discarded similar ones. She clipped off the edges of the recipes and taped them to 8.5 x 11 inch paper, then inserted them into plastic sheet protectors. She attempted to place similar recipes together. By doing this she greatly reduced her stash of recipes to try. The photo with the brown pockets shows another way she grouped recipes. Since Cath raises a large amount of vegetables and buys fruit in bulk, she often needs several recipes which use one main ingredient. So, she sorted her recipes by the fruit or veggie and now she can quickly find several ways to use up large quantities of seasonal foods.
Some recipes remained loose (she ran out of time) and these went into a school supply pencil case.
Several years ago Cath had typed up a 20+ page recipe book for her sons when they went away to school. She put a copy of this into sheet protectors and placed it along with everything else in her 3-ring notebook.
Cath decluttered about half of her stash over the course of several early mornings, sitting in a cool room and enjoying those cable-only home improvement shows. Since she gets up around 4:30 in the morning, and sometimes even earlier, she had no interruptions--especially from her night owl bestest friend!
