I love magazines. From entertainment to home décor to crafting, magazines are a perfect fit for my shortened Mommy attention span. And while many of the magazines I get end up in the old circular file, I always hang on to the cooking magazines.
In addition to my already impressive stash, my aunt recently donated several pounds of cooking magazines to the cause. (You know you’re a magazine hoarder when you can measure your collection in pounds.)
Yay for fun new magazines! Boo for trying to find a place to put them.
Magazine holders are the obvious solution for, you know, holding magazines. My mom bought me these from a Lakeside Collection catalog for super cheap.
Have you ever looked through one of those catalogs? I highly recommend it. It’s like leafing through the Sky Mall catalog with the mix of practical products alongside the Little Whizzer Liquid Dispenser. It’s only $11.95, people.
If you don’t want to shell out any cash for the magazine holders, just google “magazine holders from cereal boxes” and you will find plenty of great tutorials.
The problem with cooking magazines is that as you build your collection, it gets harder and harder to find the recipes you like.
Enter Jess’ Nerd Binder.
Locate the recipe index in each magazine (they all have them) and carefully tear it out. Punch three holes in the margin and add it to your binder.
Most magazines will print the issue number or date on the index page, but if they don’t make sure you write it on the page. Otherwise, you won’t know which magazine to pull when you find a recipe you want to try.
Now, you can use your binder just like the index of a big cookbook. Most indices are categorized, which makes searching for apps or desserts much easier.
If you subscribe to Food Network Magazine, you get this awesome index that has a picture of each recipe with the page number.
When you are looking for something new to try, just pull out the binder and flip through all the indices. If you find something worth trying, pull the correct issue from your stash and turn to the specific page. It is SO much easier than rifling through all your magazines looking for inspiration!
I am a big fan of Food Network Magazine and the now-defunct Food and Family magazine. What is your favorite cooking magazine?
I love Cooking Light
That is soooo smart, I never thought of that! Now I need to buy a binder… 🙂
Mine is Appeal, which is a free promotional magazine that our local grocery store used to supply. It was really well done and I knew I'd always be able to find the ingredients from any of the recipes, since they were all sold at that store! I just made cereal box organizers for my magazines, but I never thought of the nerd binder for the indexes!
Good post. I learn something new and challenging on blogs I stumbleupon on a daily basis.
It’s always useful to read articles from other writers and use
something from their sites.
I totally LOVE this idea! I started collecting recipes online and created a binder just for those recipes. Then I started pulling out the recipes from the magazines my family likes (sadly, I have a picky family) and put those in my binder. It cut down on my magazine clutter, but now I have this weird stash of binders….. :p