DO YOU NEED TO DECLUTTER YOUR RECIPES?

WHY DECLUTTER YOUR RECIPES?

When we talk about decluttering, we don’t usually think about our recipes. Just like everything else, if you have too much of something it becomes overwhelming. I was recently working on my weekly meal plan and noticed how many recipes I was passing by just to find one that I would possibly add to the plan for the week. Many of the recipes that I was scrolling by were recipes that I would more likely than not ever make. They weren’t just recipes that weren’t right for the season, or just not the type of meal I wanted to make this week. They were recipes for things that I may have thought at the time I would make one day. However, I have never made them, and probably never will.

Some of them were recipes that I have made once but thought they were just OK. More likely than not I will never make those recipes again. I keep my recipes digitally.  I do have some cookbooks, but I really never use them.  Even if your recipes are kept digitally, it is still important to declutter them. When there are too many recipes either in a physical format or a digital format, it makes it difficult to manage them and to find the ones that you will actually want to use.

CHOOSING FROM A LARGE NUMBER OF CHOICES CAN BE OVERWHELMING

When we have fewer things to choose from decisions become easier to make. If you have 10 recipes to choose from, it’s going to be a lot easier to figure out what to make than if you are sorting through 50 to 100 recipes. By narrowing down your recipes to a more manageable number it makes the decision on what to cook much less overwhelming. Your decision-making will also be made easier if you can get picky about the recipes you keep.  By trying to only keep the ones that you really enjoy you don’t have to worry too much about your decision.

YOU CAN ALWAYS GET A RECIPE AGAIN

Unless the recipe is something passed down from family or a very specific recipe that you love to make, you can so easily get recipes. So, try not to stress over deleting or throwing out recipes. For example, if you have an eggplant parm recipe that you have not made since you got it over a year ago you probably aren’t that into making eggplant parm. And if you decide to make it one day in the future, you will have no problem finding a recipe for it within about a minute or two!

CATEGORIZE YOUR RECIPES

After you have decluttered your recipes think about how you can best categorize them. You can limit the number of recipes that you have to dig through by putting them in categories that work best for you. When using a digital storage method you can further categorize into multiple categories. You don’t want to put things in too many categories, but for example, maybe a recipe might fall under chicken recipes, and also under instant pot recipes. I also do some kind of specific categories when I store my recipes.

For example, I have a taco Tuesday category. I recently started trying out a much larger variety of Mexican theme meals for Tuesday nights. By grouping them under a taco Tuesday folder I can easily pick from about 8 or so recipes, rather than trying to sort through those that might be under “chicken” or “beef” or another category type where I may or may not come across them.

TRY TO KEEP YOUR RECIPES IN ONE LOCATION

By keeping your recipes in one location you will always know where to go to find the recipe that you need. There are many different ways to organize your recipes in one place. You can create a physical binder which can be great for easy access to your recipes. Binders are also easy to add and remove recipes from.

You can use one of the very many recipe apps that there are. I use an app called Meal Board.  It just happens to be the one I downloaded years ago when I was looking for a meal planning app.  It worked for me, so I have continued using it. What I like about it, is that it stores all my recipes, I can lay out the recipes in a meal plan so that I know what I am making each night.  And I can use the app to create a shopping list for the meals that are in my meal plan. I can also work on meal plans in advance.

MAKE SURE TO USE NEW RECIPES, DON’T JUST ACCUMULATE THEM!

So, if I know I want to make something again 4 weeks from now I can go ahead and put the recipe in the plan for that day. This also helps me make sure I try new recipes that I put into the app.  Even if I won’t have time to make a particular new recipe right away, I will add it to a future date on my meal plans so that I don’t forget about it.

You can create a Pinterest board for your recipes. My daughter recently started creating a board for me on Pinterest where she saves recipes that she would like me to try making. To avoid having recipes all over the place, when I see something on the board that I will try making I download the recipe into my recipe app. Whatever method of keeping your recipes works best for you is fine as long as you try to keep everything together as much as you can.

COOKBOOKS

Cookbooks definitely have to be mentioned when talking about decluttering recipes. But, I don’t have too much advice here. I very rarely use cookbooks.  I find that with most cookbooks there are so many recipes that I won’t really make.  So, I don’t buy cookbooks anymore. The only kind I do get sometimes might be like a holiday dessert cookbook or something like that, which can be put out during the holidays for something fun to sit and flip through. If you do have some cookbooks with only a handful of recipes that you actually make, you could consider tearing those pages out and keeping just those recipes. You could put them in a binder or enter them into a recipe app.

KEEPING YOUR RECIPES UNCLUTTERED

Just like with all things we declutter, we end up getting more things in the future. Even when we thin out our recipe collection and get it to where it is manageable we will end up gathering new recipes in the future. So, it’s important that as you gather new recipes you only keep the ones you really like and will make again in the future. One tip is to make a recipe as soon as you can when you add it to your collection. If you are like me, you might gather recipes that sound like something you would like to make, but then you never make it. Those recipes end up becoming clutter.

If you are saving a recipe because it’s something you really want to try, then try it as soon as you can. Once you do the try recipe, get rid of it if you don’t end up loving it. If you make a recipe and it’s just OK, do you really think you will go for it again?  Probably not. If you don’t get rid of it, it will become clutter, making it more difficult for you to find the recipes that you do really like to make.

Thanks so much for checking in! If you would like to hear the podcast version of this topic to check out Lola’s Frugal Life Podcast! Also, be sure to check out my other blog posts on this site!

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