Hines Happenings: My Recipe Book

I have been forced out of my blogging slump by a friend who wants to see my recipe book. Problem: she lives in Georgia. So I thought, maybe I should just blog about it. :) Whenever I speak to groups about "Strategic Grocery Shopping" (which has been three times in the last three weeks...and once more next week!), I always bring my recipe book along and talk about it because it has been a lifesaver for our family when it comes to meal planning. I don't know about the rest of you, but I struggle with coming up with meals that sound appealing to me one at a time, nevermind doing it four or five at a time! If I were left to own devices, we'd be in trouble. So, fortunately, about four years ago I put together my recipe book. I like it so much more than the handwritten one I had before (which contained my mom's recipes and others I had collected over time) because that one was not organized. You know how it goes, spaghetti recipe followed by brownie recipe followed chicken recipe. So confusing. So, a few years ago, I typed up all the recipes that I loved from the book, formatted everything nicely, categorized it and created my book. Of course, it's probably almost doubled in size since that as I've been broadening our horizons.

Here's how my book is organized:

The overall Table of contents.

Here you can kind of see the various colors for the sections (see above)

This is the Table of Contents for the Chicken Section. Recipes that are *** are the ones we tend to make most often and those are the ones printed on the colored pages. A nice theory, but I am not sure that it actually helps me find anything quicker. :)

Those blue chicken recipes. As you can see, at the bottom of each page it lists what section it's part of and what page number it is. We created a separate document for each section, which makes it easy to update the table of contents and to print the new recipes. Simply paste into the document, apply the formatting and print!

Yes, the dessert section is about 3-4 times longer than all the other sections. This is page one of two...or three. Who knows. Anyway, what can I say. I like to bake dessert. :)

Some of my fave dessert recipes. I can post this out where the whole world can see them because I actually modify a few things. :)

And here is the super-technologically advanced way we track our meal plan. Stunning, huh? I always have an excess of these long, lined pads, so they work perfectly for this. I always make a note on the days/evenings that will particularly busy so we can plan for leftovers or for Philip to cook.