I love baking. Give me a hot oven and I'll be entertained for hours- and then rewarded with something that's usually chocolatey.

While I haven't been posting recipes here recently, a quick glance through the archives is a testament to my prolific sweet tooth but since doing a dietary cleanse I've been loving the benefits of the weight I lost and what I learned about keeping my energy levels high without the crashes. So I've been peeling back the layers of my love of baking with the hope of reducing how much (delicious) butter & sugar is mandatory to my hobby.

I've discovered that my love of baking it's really a love of being in the kitchen, working with my hands, making a giant mess while watching Netflix on my iPad. Perfect!

Knowing that I love all the above and that I'm an organization nut, I challenged myself to plan at least three meals for Jesse and I every week. I've shared how I turn my meal planning list into a grocery list before, but I wanted to share the recipe organization and meal planning method that's working for me now.

1. Figure out what isn't working & break up with it.

I often find that pin pointing what doesn't work, or why a system isn't fun or simple to use is usually much easier to discover than starting out with dreaming up solutions. When I looked at why I didn't love cooking I realized that I had a system based on recipe cards that I hated. While recipe cards are adorable, they're not practical for me so I finally ditched system I've been halfheartedly stuffing printed recipes into since university.

In practice I found that recipe cards were too labor intensive, cramped, didn't leave room for revisions, and didn't reflect how I find my recipes (online, then printed when I find a winner). Understanding the problem made the answer simple:  I needed a master recipe binder, preferable with page protectors to save my recipes from my stray sweet potato bits and spitting frying pans!

Now that I'm armed with my binder, I have a dedicated holding place for recipes and it's tidy as soon as I grab a hold punch. I can make notes, include a small picture of the meal that reminds me why I wanted to make it in the first place & I'm immediately excited to start when I open it up.

Make your own recipe binder with what you have:

Grab a hole punch and a spare binder (or finally recycle your notes from school and reclaim a binder!) and you have your own ready to go. You don't need fancy tabs if you make your own by stapling card stock to loose leaf, or if you make tabs with scrap paper and tape. If you'd like a tutorial, check out this DIY Binder Tab tutorial & this simple Pinterest tutorial.

2. Separate the tested from the tried and true

My binder is separated into tabs that work for our split kitchen (I'm vegetarian & my husband is allergic to everything), with the most important section right at the front: To Try Out.

My only rule is that I only file recipes into a section of the binder when I've tried the recipe.

This might sound obvious or odd, depending on how you do things, but when I make food at home when I'm in one of two moods: hungry & impatient (and snacking while I cook) or excited to cook  with enough time to take it slow. If I'm approaching a meal as a means to an end, the last thing I want to do is shuffle through recipes I'm not familiar with. Similarly, when I want to make something new & fun I don't want to rifle through recipes I grew up with.

To re-shuffle my recipes into this system took 15 mins, and it doesn't take any extra time to keep up. It's also a big time saver when I reach to the binder for ideas.

3. Make my weekly meal planning decisions.

Here's my whole system for weekly meal planning – it's simple and fast [Update: 2015/02] and two years later I'm still using it!:

1. I print out recipes that I'd like to try as I find them and add the results into the “To Try Out” section of my binder.
2. Once a week I go through the binder, pull recipes I'd like to try, and make a small pile for each day of the week across the kitchen counter. So for example, Sunday is on the far left and once I've finished pulling the recipes I'll make on that day (usually 1 – 3) I move on to making the next stack that represents Monday. It's visual, simple, and very fast, and makes planning to use leftovers in other meals easier for me.
3. I look at the list of ingredients for each recipe and check the cupboards. Any ingredients that are missing are entered into the grocery list sharing app Jesse and I use. There are lots of apps that do this, but we use Buy Me A Pie.
4. I enter the meal plan into a shared calendar for my husband and I, he gets a notification from the grocery app and our calendar, and immediately sees what's going on.

The initial line up sorting takes me under 10 minutes and breaking it down into my grocery list takes roughly the same amount of time. That means that after a 30 Minute Weekly Meal Planning session, I have a plan that I can use to tackle the week!

4. Record the results!

On a whim (because I'm Type A & like marking my work?) I started making notes on how Jesse & I liked each recipe. This has been one of the most fun improvements of my new system. Most have an informal jot note like “J: 8/10 & K:6/10” at the bottom, but on recent print outs I've added a scoring section.  This is mostly for my amusement, but I think it will also be helpful for reference when I have a big collection to go through :)

And it goes without saying, but if it's not loved, it's out of the binder! There are too many tasty meals to cook anything mediocre, and that's just how I like it.

Are you doing any meal planning right now? How do you keep it organized & from eating up your time?

I feel like most of us fall in and out of it, but it's a fun groove for me to enjoy now! Are you curious about what the “Effing fantastic” 10/10 meal was above? I'll pop the link in the comments :)

Also, I just realized that I write a verdict on each recipe & decide on them in a line up. I really have watched a lot of Law & Order on Netflix recently, haven't I…