Simple Recipe Collection

About seven years ago, my recipes were kept in a file folder which was jammed-packed with recipes I'd both tried and not tried, all mixed together in a messy pile of barely-tapped potential. When I would go to look for a recipe I had in mind, I spent most of my time shuffling through the debris, muttering to myself, "I know it's here somewhere...." For those of you who know me, it's shocking, I know. But that was my cooking life for the first two years of our marriage. Until.....one day, I had an epiphany that literally changed my life: Why not type out any recipe I know I'll use again on a 4x6" note card and keep them in a photo album, organized by category? And thus was born the document that my husband puts on his list of things for which he'd run into a burning building to save: my recipe book.

Meet one of my best friends: This baby makes my life infinitely easier and is really not that hard to keep up. Not only can I quickly and easily find any recipe I'm looking for, but it also makes menu planning much more simple because I can just flip through the categories to get some ideas of things I'm already confident I can make well.

As you can see, I used file folder tabs to delineate the categories, plain white 4x6" notecards to print the recipes out on, and a refillable 3-ring photo album to put them all in. Easy peasy.
And this week marked an important event in the life of my recipe book. Because my collection is growing so large, I was running out of room to put new pages in the book. Hence, Book #2 came into being. And now my recipes have breathing room. Ahhhhhh......

So, how do you organize your recipes? Do you have a box that you keep them all in? A binder? A computer file? Nothing at all? Where do you go when you want to access a tried-and-true recipe that you've made before?