Home Back to Articles Shannon Seek Author, Organic Organizing Culinary clutter: Tame your recipes and make them work for you Shannon Seek Quoted in the Press on Organizing Recipes by Jodie Chase,CONTRIBUTOR ANG Newspapers, Food Editor, Danielle Centoni Featured in the Oakland Tribune (Wed., July 24, 2002) and the Marin Independent Journal (August, 2002) I went hunting for a recipe recently. It was for the killer Chocolate Oozing Cake served at Wild Hare in Menlo Park. But when I looked in my binder of dessert recipes, it wasn't in there. Oh, there were quite a few for Molten Chocolate Cake, Warm Chocolate Cake, even Warm Soft Chocolate Cake, but no Chocolate Oozing Cake. The challenge was on. I looked through stacks and stacks of food articles I'd been meaning to file. There were recipes from newspapers, magazines, the Internet and cooking shows. Since this particular recipe came from a restaurant, at least I could rule out my shelf full of cookbooks and the recipes I'd acquired from my cooking classes. The only thing my search turned up was this: Like many people, my recipe obsession has become a disorder and I need to find a way to get things in order. How had things gotten this out of control? Does this happen to everybody? I polled my friends, family and associates. I consulted experts and chefs. The more I explored this passion for collecting recipes, the more I realized I am not alone. Whether they store them in a recipe card file, or stuff them in a drawer, almost everyone, it seems, has trouble keeping a handle on their recipes. Kate Mitchell, a food lover from San Francisco, stuffs her clippings in a big woven market bag, filled to the brim with files and loose recipes. Mitchell works 60 to 80 hours a week, and relaxes by clipping recipes from magazines. She often brings them with her on business trips. ``On a cross-country flight I can vicariously eat at least 5000 calories,'' she says, laughing. ``Can you imagine what would happen if I had the time to actually cook?'' ``I clip recipes everywhere I go,'' echoes Betsy Nakamura, an avid home chef from San Rafael, ``even sitting in the doctor's office, where I've been known to surreptitiously rip out a recipe, coughing to hide the sound.'' Her filing system? ``I stick recipes in an accordion file. I used to use the same file divided into categories, but now I just shove them all in the back pocket, to be filed some day.'' Despite her healthy collection, Nakamura estimates she's only used about 5 percent of the recipes. ``Just today,'' she says, ``I clipped three recipes for dishes I already make all the time. I don't need a new recipe for them, but I saved them anyway.'' Food professionals are not immune to culinary clutter, either. ``It's a problem!'' says chef Aliza Stern, culinary producer of KRON's cooking show ``Bay Cafe.'' While she is hyper-organized at the TV station, it's a little different at home. ``There are so many recipes,'' she says. ``I have a stack of them, two cookbooks with recipes stuck inside, and I write recipes in a journal. Plus, for me, I don't read novels, I read cookbooks.'' Stern has figured out a few ways for controlling her culinary build-up. When she gets recipes off the Internet, she files them in the Web site's recipe box. Or she'll cut and paste them into a word processing document and store them in her computer. She also writes out recipes in a journal, numbers the pages and creates an index. Alton Brown, cookbook author and host of ``Good Eats'' on Food Network, seems to know just about everything about food, so I asked if he had any secrets for getting organized. ``OK, here's the thing about recipes,'' he says. ``You have to think about recipes as if they are tools, and store them the way you would tools. You should keep them handy, like your favorite knives are in the knife block right there, the tongs, the spatula you like, you keep 'em in the drawer by the cooktop.'' Shoving recipes into a big book defeats the purpose of clipping them, Brown says. ``Pretty soon you've got clutter and clutter is the enemy of all usefulness.'' The key to staying ahead of the mess is being selective. Don't cut out every recipe you see or keep every one a relative gives you. Sift through them from the start to decide which ones ``identify who you are as a cook,'' says Brown. If you don't think you have the discipline to toss out some of the recipes you've clung to all these years, consider contacting a professional organizer. Angela Wallace of Wallace Associates in Novato says her first step would be to sort through the recipes, then purge. ``Within those stacks of recipes, there are those you know you would really like to try, those you already know you love, and others that, by a certain amount of time, you'll probably never try _ and those you can let go of.'' It seems that even Wallace, a member and past president of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers, has her own challenges organizing recipes. ``I have a file of recipe cards with some favorites stuck in the front, and I have an old Betty Crocker cookbook that's in a binder, and I have papers stuck in that,'' she says. ``I also have cookbooks on different kinds of ethnic cooking. For example, I have a Greek cookbook, and my favorite family Greek recipes that are typed on paper, I keep in that book.'' (continued, above right) Back to the top (continued) Though Wallace's system may seem a bit out of the ordinary, it works for her. ``I pretty much can lay my hands on any of my favorite recipes at any one time,'' she says. And that's the whole point, says Shannon Seek, a professional organizer based in Larkspur. ``There are no rules. As long as it works for you and you can find your recipes, that's all you need,'' she says. ``If you like to feel your way through things, the card or the accordion file would be the best thing,'' advises Seek. ``The more visual you are you should go for the binder, because you'll be able to flip through.'' But for many people, getting their recipes in order isn't so much about finding the right system, but about finding the right perspective. ``Most people find organizing stressful,'' says Seek. ``But it doesn't have to make you suffer. It's not your mother telling you to put things away, you're doing it for you.'' Seek has developed what she calls the ``Organic Organizing Matrix,'' a system which helps people get around the roadblocks keeping them from getting organized, roadblocks that include feeling overwhelmed, feeling guilty for letting things get out of hand, being too exhausted to find the time or not knowing how to begin. Making a commitment to getting organized is the first step, she says. ``You need to create some sort of motivation to want to get organized. Will it allow you to be able to find those recipes to make more exciting meals? If you have a reason to overcome the guilt, the exhaustion and the feeling overwhelmed, you'll do it.'' And Seek suggests starting small. Putting aside just five or 10 minutes a day, or a half an hour a week will make a difference. ``You can put the timer on, so it doesn't feel like a big production,'' says Seek. ``Avoid marathon sessions. You don't want to exhaust yourself when you're organizing because you won't do it again.'' Once you've developed a system that works for you and gotten those recipes under control, it makes it easier to pass them along to friends and family, and preserve traditions. ``It's really important to archive your recipes, whether you've torn them out of a magazine or inherited a 3-by-5 card from your grandmother,'' says Tori Ritchie, a Bay Area cookbook writer and host of ``Ultimate Kitchens'' on the Food Network. Ritchie thinks preserving recipes is so important, in fact, she's starting a business to help people organize their personal recipes. ``Sharing personal recipes is a way of sharing yourself. It's kind of a dying art.'' Back to the top back to Articles | Home |   | OOM Store |   | Info (Newsletter) |   | Contact |   | Privacy Policy | All Rights Reserved. Copyright, Shannon Seek, Seek Solutions, 1996-2004 Marin County, San Francisco Bay Area, California (CA), USA Tel +1 415-925-8856 www.organicorganizing.com info@organicorganizing.com