Organize Your Digital Recipes

Welcome to Day 11 of the Whip Your Kitchen Into Shape challenge! If you missed the introduction to the challenge, go here to find out all about it.

This week we'll be focusing all on recipes and meal planning. This is definitely my favorite part of the challenge!

Today we're going to focus on organizing all of our recipes digitally. (Tomorrow we'll work on organizing frequently used printed recipes.) There are many different ways you can digitally organize your recipes.

Do you struggle to find a way to organize recipes that really works? I did for years. It’s tough. I had so many recipes I wanted to try but no good way to keep up with them all. I had stacks torn out of magazines, written on random papers, in e-mails, in cookbooks, and I was running across new ones all the time. I have finally found a way to organize recipes that really works for me and is easy to maintain using Evernote! I originally shared this method over two years ago (and I'd been using it for well over a year at the time), and I'm still loving it!

I store all my recipes like this – both recipes I'd like to try and my tried and true recipes. I've since come up with a system for storing some of my frequently used recipes in printed form, but they're here in the digital system as well.

This method solves so many of problems:

• I can access ALL my recipes from my phone or computer.
• They are completely neat and tidy – no more piles of paper.
• It didn’t take forever to import the recipes.
• It’s so easy to find exactly what I need. Now I’m actually using the recipes!

If you want to see all the details about how this method works, including a detailed tutorial, click here:

If you don't think the Evernote method is for you,  I know a lot of people have great success using Pinterest to organize recipes found online. If you are new to Pinterest, click to see my tutorial for how to use Pinterest:

If you do use Pinterest as a place to keep track of your recipes, I definitely recommend having organized boards, so you can easily find what you need. Click here to see how to organize your Pinterest boards.

The most important thing is to pick out a method and stick with it, so you always know where to find what your recipes.

Today's Assignment: If you only have a few minutes, determine a method for organizing your recipes, and take the first few steps. If you already have a method that is working well for you, spend a few minutes tidying it up if necessary. If you have more time, go ahead and get as many recipes into your new system as you can. Do NOT get caught up in trying to import every single recipe into your chosen method. Do as much as you have time for and then use the system going forward.

Then stop by our challenge Facebook group to let us know how it went, or share photos of your online recipe organizing system on Instagram with the hashtag #KitchenChallenge. I can't wait to see your progress!