The other day I found out about a contest from Real Simple Magazine for $10,000 & a session with a professional organizer.  You can enter the contest here.

One way to enter the contest is to give an organizing tip. Here is what I submitted:

Do you have lots of loose recipes from magazines that are flying around your kitchen? Organize them with inexpensive looseleaf binders.

Think about how you really cook and create a binder for each category. (For example, I generally look in the fridge,see what I have for a "main ingredient" and take it from there, so my binders are organized by ingredients I commonly use.  If you love ethnic food, you may want to have a seperate binder for each kind of ethnic food you make often.) Write the category down the spine so it will be easy to locate what you are looking for when they are on the shelf. You can use a sharpie, or a label maker for nice looking spines.

Next you can either place each recipe into a clear plastic sleve and insert it into the appropriate binder OR simply tape the recipe onto a blank piece of 3-hole-punched paper and place in the binder. It helps to have a photo copier around in case the recipe is continued on the other side of the page, or you want to put one recipe in more than one binder.  Also, invest in dividers so you can sub-divide your binders (That is, if you are an organization geek like me  :)

After all of this work, you'll have your own custom cookbooks ready for your next cullinary whim! They look great on the shelf too.

One more tip, if you have a LOT of recipes to put in the binders, you'll want to sort them into the categories first, and then put them into binders. It's the kind of rote thing that can be done while watching TV.

How do you organize your recipes?