Today's project was to put all the recipes that are drifting around in my kitchen into one organized place. I had a bunch of recipes that were written on Post-It Notes, 3x5 notecards, or various other slips of paper. These were magneted to the refrigerator or stuck to the inside of the cupboard door next to the stove or floating around in my cookbook.

I got the spark of the idea from a magazine I was reading recently that suggested using a "brag-book" type photo album to house recipes on index cards. These albums usually hold 24 to 36 photos. Just slide your recipe cards into the plastic photo holder sleeves and you have a tidy spill-proof cookbook at your fingertips.

I didn't have recipe cards though, and my recipe notes were in rather poor condition, so I typed them into a document, setting my margins to 1/2" on the left and 5-1/2" on the right. I needed to squeeze the recipe into 4" in length, so some recipes required a two-column layout for the ingredients, one needed smaller text. I printed the recipes and cut them to size (4 x 6") on my paper cutter.

The finished product is even better than I expected. I only put 8 recipes in my book... these are the recipes I make all the time but still require the recipe because I don't know it by heart. I figure I can add recipes that I want to try out, or new favorites as we happen upon them.

I found the album at Michaels, and it was only 66¢. The one drawback to this album is that I cannot change the cover. I think I will be able to mod podge over it if I want to. The cover is aesthetically fine, it's just that it's not obvious which is the front and which is the back. In the past I have bought brag books at Target... they have albums that hold 36 prints and cost around $2. The advantage to these is that the cover art slips into a pocket so it can be easily replaced.