Well, my internal clock is still waking me up at 5am daily! This past weekend I managed to stay in bed until 6am, and Sunday until 7am.

My morning project for this week has been organizing my recipe binder.  I’m pretty good about only keeping recipes that I actually use and like.  I have a lot of family recipes and I find most of my new recipes from the internet- either from YourHomeBasedMom.com or AllRecipes.com. 

Last year I tried to organize my binder by typing up all my recipes in an identical format.  But when I went to print them out, some printed landsdcape and others portrait.  I must have had two different templates I was using, I’m not sure.

Worse, I decided to save space by printing them out double-sided.

Well, that resulted in a recipe for Artichoke Chicken on the back of Cinnabon Cinnamon Rolls.  The next page was Heavenly Halibut followed by Preschool Play-doh.  D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R.

So now when I need to find a recipe in my book, I’m thumbing through the whole book trying to find it.  And everything I’ve printed off the internet is a folded up piece of paper also in no particular order.  It’s driving me nuts! 

So my project has been to enter my newest recipes in the same format as the old recipes….and sort them into categories and label them so they remain grouped together on the computer:

Chicken- Artichoke Chicken Delight
Soup- Taco Soup
Dessert- Liane’s Brownies
Breads- Cinnabon Cinnamon Rolls
Fish- Heavenly Halibut
Other- Playdoh
etc. etc.

Today I finally finished printing them all out… by group….in alphabetical order.  On a heavier 30 lb paper.  I custom selected paper to print my recipes on….lighter than typical cardstock, yet thicker than regular 20 lb paper.  Every recipe is in identical format.  I even made custom tabs to divide my recipe binder.

My new problem:  my binder is full, and I still have about 20 recipes to print out! 

I looked online to see if I could get a thicker 3-ring recipe binder, but it’s such a unique size (6.5×8.5 that I’m not having any luck.  I even checked ebay.

So do I reprint them all on regular 20 lb paper and hope that helps to make them fit?

Or do I try to do the double-sided printing again to save space?  But that would involve re-formatting the margins on all the ‘backside’ recipes.

Or do I give up and start using a regular 8.5×11 binder?  At least that way when I print a recipe off the internet, it automatically fits in the binder!

Or do I start from scratch and buy a fancy ‘recipe’ organizing software program that will print it out for me?

My problem is that everything has to be identical.  Not hand written, not  on recipe cards.  All the same format. Every page.

Why do I do this to myself?