How to Build a Recipe Binder | 123

The recipe binder we built has been around for over a year now and we think it's a good time to do a check in episode talking you through how to get the most out of your binder with a few different suggestions and tips. 

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hi everybody. I'm Kelsey Nixon and this is Kitchen Prescription,
the podcast you listened to when you don't know what
to make for dinner. Today's episode one hundred and twenty three,
how to build a recipe binder. This week, I visited
my sister last minute after she wound up in the
hospital thanks to an awful case of pneumonia. I hopped
on a plane and went to help her shuttle her
kids from place to place. I made a few meals.

(00:27):
It was a quick trip, but I had brought her
a copy of our newest recipe collection that launched last week,
our Salad Collection, to put in her recipe binder. I literally,
we had launched it the exact day that I ended
up traveling, and I thought I'll just grab it and
take it to her. When I got to her house,
things settled a little bit, she was resting. I picked

(00:47):
up her binder to add the salad collection under her
salad tab, and like half the recipes fell out of
the binder. And I quickly realized that it was kind
of a mess, and to no fault of hers. Life
is crazy, get it. But I thought, you know what
if I just spent a little bit of time cleaning
this up. I just got to clip these recipes into
the categories that they belong in, fill in some blanks.

(01:08):
I'm going to get this binder ready to go, so honestly,
I had it in tiptop shape in about forty five minutes,
and now she's got a super helpful tool for meal
planning and making dinner at her fingertips, especially as she's
kind of getting back to full health. She's already called
me since leaving and mentioned that she's reached for it
multiple times and it really is so much better. So

(01:31):
there are a few steps I think that are critical
when setting up your binder to simplify your life really
surrounding dinner, and I want to walk through those with
you today. Whether you're using our recipe binder or a
binder of your own, the tips will still apply, and
I will forever stand by the fact that having a
home base for the recipes you make most often is

(01:52):
one of the best ways to help with dinner time
decision fatigue. But before we do that, let's do what
we always do and start by suggesting a few recipes
you could throw on your meal plan for the week,
Because dinner never takes a break. First, we are making sturfry.
I'm on a sturfry kick. I made this Mediterranean sturfry
this past week. I did the Chariaki chicken sturfry the

(02:12):
week before. This week pork and pineapple sturfry. It happens
to be a really good method for my family right
now because all of my kids love rice right now
and like doing chicken or protein that's like in small
little chunks that they eat that more and then I
can separate the veggies from my picky eaters. So this

(02:33):
pork and pineapple sturf fry is perfect for that. And
the fact that it's got pineapple in it, which is
sweet and tastes like candy, is even better. So this
is a really easy recipe. I use a pork tenderloin,
which I seem to always have one of those in
my deep freezer, so this is a great thing that
I can pull from or if, like if I buy
the pork tenderloin at Costco, I usually portion it into

(02:55):
four separate pieces. You buy two big ones, and my
family for a recipe like this only needs half of
a pork tenderlin and it's a really affordable lean protein.
So we're all looking to cut costs at the grocery
store right now, and pork tenderlin is a great way
to do that. If you have a pork tenderlin on hand,
make this pork and pineapple store fry. You'll love it. Next,
spiced chicken with yogurt sauce. This was I think we

(03:19):
added this d Respee club right at the beginning of
the year, and I was shocked at how many of
you made it and immediately went to review it and
told me how much you loved it. It's reminiscent of
the halal food that I had when I lived in
New York City. It's so good, It's really simple. It's
like got a really interesting spice mixture, It's got a

(03:40):
creamy yogurt sauce. We also serve it over rice with
pea bread. So just leaning into what my kids like.
My kids really like rice right now. And then finally,
my roasted Mediterranean sweet potatoes. I'm continuing to use this
viral hack that has continues to go viral. I cannot
believe how many millions of people have watched my method

(04:00):
for cooking sweet potatoes and recip potatoes. In fact, I'm
now getting reels of people saying I tried Kelsey Nixon's
viral hack for roasting potatoes, so it really has kind
of caught fire, and it's because it's so great. It's
so quick and easy. So I'm going to do this
with sweet potatoes, and I'm going to make this delicious
chopped Mediterranean salad to go over the top. It's got

(04:21):
tomatoes and cucumbers and a yogurt sauce. So what I
like about this menu is I'm using similar ingredients with
different flavor profiles, which really kind of helps with my
grocery budget for the week. It kind of extends those
ingredients so that I'm cooking through everything and wasting less.
All right, there are your recipes for the week. You
can find and put them all in Recipe Club individually

(04:43):
or in our weekly meal plant with an easy to
follow shopping lists broken down by recipe. I also want
to remind you that at the end of this week
is Easter. I guess I'll come to you one more
time just a few days before Easter. But don't forget that.
In Recipe Club, we have our Holiday Hub where we
have holiday menus for all of the main your holidays
throughout the year, including Easter. I just did a test

(05:03):
run for all of our Easter recipes and they are delicious.
I know that last week we spent a whole episode
dedicated to what I'm making for Easter. But let me
tell you, Easter doesn't get enough credit. It's not really
like the hero when it comes to food holidays. But
a deviled egg, a delicious scalped potato, a buttery roll,
and some ham, come on, It's delicious. So make sure

(05:26):
you check out our Easter Holiday Hub. There's lots of
really good resources in there. You can print out the
recipes whatever you want to do. Speaking of printing recipes,
I am so excited to be chatting with you about
building that recipe binder today. And if you are someone
who has purchased a binder, we have recently added a
guide or a how to class within Recipe Club on

(05:49):
how to build your binder. It's gonna be a lot
of the same stuff we talk about here on the
podcast today, but I'm showing you everything, including my own binder,
where I'm gonna walk you through exactly how I said
it up, how I kind of rotate rotate things out
throughout the year, and I think it'll be really helpful
if you are wanting a recipe binder to be part
of your simple dinner system. All right, let's jump into

(06:10):
the back half of the podcast and chat about recipe
binders a bit more. Eighteen months ago, I launched my
first independent product, a premium recipe binder, to help overwhelmed
parents get dinner on the table more easily with less

(06:31):
dinner time decision fatigue. You know, That's what I'm all about.
That's why I created a recipe Club, and the recipe
binder was created as a companion piece to recipe Club.
You can use them independent of one another, but they
work best together. I made prototypes of this binder. I
sent them to my college friends. I tested paper, I
tested sheet protectors. We even had a spill test on

(06:53):
the fabric that is used to coat the exterior of
our binders to make sure that it could withstand everything
from bright red and aerosauce to oil splatters while you
making a storefry. It took nearly a year to bring
this product to life, but we did it. We sold
out immediately and we have sold thousands of them since.
In fact, I have not been able to park my

(07:13):
car in my garage ever since because my garage is
filled with recipe binders. It's our happy, humble warehouse, and
hopefully we'll be growing out of there soon. But this
is you know, all the best companies start in a garage, right,
Recipe Clubs certainly has. When I set out to create
the binder, I wanted it to be pretty enough that

(07:34):
you could display it on your kitchen counter at all
times and not worry about shoving it away behind a
closed cabinet door. I wanted it to have a built
in system so that it would stay organized without getting unwieldy.
Many of you have had them for well over a
year now, and they're an incredible tool for helping dinner
run smoothly in your homes. But I've also heard from
some of you that have been maybe paralyzed by decision

(07:57):
fatigue with what recipes to put in your binder, or
like my sister, she knew what recipes she wanted, but
she just couldn't decide on the categories, so they were
just you know, sitting in there without actually being clipped
into her binder, and all she had to do was
make a couple quick decisions. I've also heard from some
of you on the other side of the spectrum that
have too many recipes in your binder. You've been using

(08:17):
it for a year now and it's bursting at the seams.
So today I want to walk you through my best
suggestions for setting up a binder, give you someone of
a virtual tour of mine as I talk you through
it and discuss my best suggestions for keeping it in
tiptop helpful shape. First of all, when we were first
developing this product, we often use the phrase everyday heirloom.

(08:39):
We created the recipe Binder as a place to organize
your family's favorite recipes and new meals to try. It's
intended to be both an everyday resource plus an heirloom
made from premium materials that make it both beautiful and
durable enough to kind of claim a permanent spot on
your kitchen countertop. If you're someone who doesn't love looking

(09:00):
from their phone, the recipe binder is a must. I
know for me personally, when I go to retrieve a
recipe from my phone or a computer, I'm basically opening
up a world of distraction. I don't enjoy the process
as much and I hate being on my phone that
time of day, around anytime after five pm, I really
try an unplug from my phone and focus on my family.

(09:21):
But if I pull up a rescpue on Instagram, I
forget about it. I'm gone. And a lot of you
would agree with me that cooking from a hard copy
it really is more enjoyable and more efficient. Anytime I
put up a poll on Instagram about this, at least
eighty five percent of you say yes. If given the
opportunity to cook from my phone or a printed hard copy,
I choose the printed hard copy every time. But I

(09:42):
want you to think of your recipe binder as a living,
breathing item in your kitchen. It's meant to be used
and updated, with recipes swapped in and out of it
every so often. As you experience different chapters of life.
The recipes you cook will obviously change. You'll have some
classics that you always make, but you might be feeding
picky toddlers right now, and someone else might be feeding

(10:04):
hungry teenagers, or you might be adjusting to cooking as
empty nesters, and the recipes in your binder would change
according to that. So the purpose of your binder really
is to organize the recipes that you make most often
given your current chapter of life. It's not supposed to
be a place where you store every single recipe you've

(10:24):
ever made or printed from the internet, because that just
becomes pinterest, that just becomes this. It's too much information.
And we all know that the hardest part about making
dinner is deciding what to make. So this binder, this
binder that sits on your countertop, it is not going
to contain more than one hundred recipes because no one
needs more than one hundred recipes to think about when

(10:47):
they're deciding what to make for the week. It's too
many decisions to make. So with all that said, let's
talk about what to do when you first receive your
binder or start building one from scratch. The first thing
is to not let paralysis prevent you from filling it up.
The only thing worse than an overstepped binder is an
empty binder. You need to commit to customizing it for

(11:09):
your current chapter of life and editing as you go. Personally,
I like to update mine quarterly and have a reminder
in my calendar to do so. So these are the
times I do it. January New Year, New me new
routines after the holidays. I usually do it right after
we've come back from Christmas break, but before school has
started yet. I go through my binder. I take out

(11:30):
the Thanksgiving recipes, I take out the Christmas cookies. I
take out anything that is not relevant for the next
three or four months. And I added some things that
like this year. You know what I added. I added
a tab that said protein, and I added a bunch
of protein rich recipes because that was a goal for
me at the starting start of the year, was to

(11:51):
just become more protein aware. And so that's an example
of customizing it for whatever chapter I happened to be in.
The next time I have is May first, and I
call this the Summer swap, so May first because if
you're a parent, you know that May sometimes called May Somber,
is one of the craziest months of the year because
all of the end of school things are happening and

(12:12):
all of the spring sports things are wrapping up. So
I like to update it right before because I always
I always fill in my five ingredient recipes then because
I know I'm gonna rely heavily on shortcut ingredients and
five ingredient recipes during the month of May, and to
be quite honest, I'm gonna do that throughout the summer.
It seems like cooking should be easier in the summer,

(12:34):
but it's not. It's completely different. We lose our regular
routines and I actually think it can be harder. So
I'm gonna be thinking about grilling recipes. I'm gonna add
my grilling recipes in there. I don't need my grilling
recipes in December. It's too cold outside. So that's an
example of the swap. And it doesn't take long. It
just is And in some ways it reminds you of

(12:57):
let this is my system, this is what I've committed to,
and this is I'm going to make my life easier
surrounding dinner. The next time is August back to school.
So right before we head back to school, I go
in and I usually add some lunch recipes. I have
some lunch and some meal prep because when I start
making lunch for my kids, I usually recommit making lunch

(13:18):
for myself. And then November, right at the beginning of November,
I add all of the holiday and hosting favorites. Actually,
I think it's right before Halloween that I do this
because I have some really fun Halloween recipes that I
don't like to skip out on, like homemade root beer
and our pumpkin chili, and so I go in and
do like a holiday refresh, and I pull all of
those holiday recipes into my binder. When you first get

(13:42):
your binder, I suggest to start by picking your categories
rather than the individual recipes. So if you buy our binder,
you get eight tabs, and think about it. Eight tabs.
And if we're trying to stick around one hundred recipes,
if you do a ballpark of a round ten recipes
per category, then you should end up somewhere one hundred

(14:03):
recipes or less. So for that chapter or season of life,
think about the categories that make sense. It might be
five ingredients, it might be slow cooker, it might be grilling.
It might be breakfast, it might be you know, lunch.
Just think about what it is that you what kind
of world you want to be cooking from during that season.

(14:24):
One exception to this is that I always have a
favorites tab. If there are recipes you know you make
all year round, store those in the favorites tab. Sometimes
I call them greatest hits and for a long time,
this like list just lived in my phone. In fact,
it still does. But it's our greatest hits, and it's
the recipes that I make most often that my kids
will always eat. And it's it's the recipes that when

(14:47):
my kids leave the nest and move on from home,
they'll remember Mom's baked zd or they'll remember the Indian
butter chicken, or they'll remember the Mediterranean stuff right, whatever
it is. I do keep those the Mississippi pot ROAs,
that's one my kids love. I do keep those in
my binder all the time. There's about eight of them,

(15:08):
so regardless of the time of the year, if I'm
making those, they can just stay in there permanently. And
that's under the favorites tab. So after you've determined your
categories and you've labeled them, and you can either label
them if you have our binder with the labels we provide,
or you can use a label maker, or you can
use this sharpie however you want to do it. Pick
your labels. What's nice about a sticker label is I

(15:31):
am often changing that out, so like I'm about to
take out my soups and put in my grilling recipes
and I will just swap that out. Like I said,
there are labels that come with our binder, but I
also use my label maker, and because I'm a little extra,
I buy the label tape that has gold lettering on

(15:52):
it so it matches my other labels. Some of you
out there will understand me. It's great and so if
I'm making a quick label, it's no big deal for
me to do that. So for me, right now, before
I have done my May swap, I will tell you
what my categories are. They're slow cooker, skillet sheet, pan,

(16:15):
five ingredient soups, salads, cheat sheets, and favorites. So I
will keep some of those. Obviously, I'm going to keep
salads throughout the summer. I might even keep slow cooker
throughout the summer, but I am going to swap out
my soups for sure. You're gonna aim for eight to
ten recipes per tab. I always go front and back

(16:36):
so that I'm taking full advantage of all of the space.
And then if you have some leftover space, I usually
fill it in with cheat sheets or holiday specific recipes
for that time of year. If I'm trying out a
new recipe that i've printed, I put it in the
pocket folder in the back of the binder as a
recipe to try. I don't necessarily automatically add it to

(16:57):
the binder. If we make it and we love it,
then I'll consider adding it to the binder. But that's
why I have that pocket folder. Or sometimes like if
I'm doing a meal plan for the week and I'm
using some of the recipes that are kind of regularly
in my binder, or there's two or three that are not,
it goes in the folder, and then I know I
have to make a decision about what's in the folder.

(17:17):
Am I adding it here or am I getting rid
of it? Or you're probably asking at this point, what
do you do with all those recipes you're not currently
storing in your binder? And my answer is to create
either an index binder or utilize like my sister does
a desktop file organizer to store her recipes that she's
not using. For example, she had her Thanksgiving recipes still

(17:41):
in her binder. She clearly does not need her Thanksgiving
recipes for another six months, so I pulled her Thanksgiving
recipes out of her binder. I put them in her
desktop file organizer under a tab that says Thanksgiving, and
instead I added our salad collection because that felt like
a needed swap. Now my index binder for me, like

(18:03):
I said, my sister uses the desktop file organizer. I
use like a big three inch binder, and I have
all of the same categories like those core like eight
categories that I said, plus a few extras and a
lot of holiday I love cooking certain recipes for holidays,
so like, I just pulled my Easter recipes out of

(18:24):
the index binder and I put them in my binder
because Easter's about ten days away. When Easter's over, there's
no need for those to continue to live in there.
I guess they could, like if I wanted to make
devil eggs again, you know they could. But it's like
I work between these two binders where I like. Another
great example would be something like a sheet panelasagna, which

(18:48):
I've made a bunch this winter, but I'm probably gonna
take a break from the sheet panelasagna in the summer
because we also don't want to get bored of making
the same recipes over and over again. I know we're
gonna want to eat it again, so I don't want
to talk the recipe so the index binder is the
perfect place for it to go under the sheet pan tab.
So to run through those steps again just really quickly.

(19:08):
The first thing you're gonna do with any binder is
you're going to decide your categories first and include a
favorites tab, because there's going to be some recipes that
you're like, oh, but we always make the big ZD,
but it's not in one of these categories. Just put
it in the favorites tab. Pick your categories. Then go
through your recipes, whether you store them in an app,
whether you're a member of Recipe Club and you store
them there, whatever it may be, whether you have them

(19:30):
printed an existing binder, and put the top ten recipes
in those categories into your primary binder. The rest of
the recipes keep in your index binder. Another option, like
my sister in law Betsy does, is rather than having
one big index binder, I think she has three or
four that like one is like sides, desserts, I can't

(19:51):
remembread something like that. You could do kind of mini
index binders as well. But the point of having a
recipe binder that lives on your kitchen counter is for
it to reduce the amount of decisions you have to make,
just the recipes that are working for you. Right then,
all right, Finally, I want to leave you with a
few other tips that are responses to some frequently asked questions.

(20:12):
Probably the most is paper to print on. When you
buy our binder or you buy our recipe collections, you'll
notice they printed on really nice thick paper. But I
don't want you to be precious about this. Remember your
binder is supposed to be living and breathingly. You're supposed
to be swapping things in and out. Don't be afraid
to use your home printer if you have one, and

(20:33):
if you don't, I know we are going like we
are moving digital. I get it, but I can't tell
you how much I use my home printer. Use it
all the time, and I use it for recipes a lot.
So get a printer. If you don't have a printer
and you really care about the quality of the paper,
you want to print all of those recipes on nice

(20:53):
thick paper. My best advice is to send you to
a printer like Staples locally, or to purchase our printed
recipe collections. And our collections are our most popular recipes
in any given category. But it's really simple to do.
I actually just sent them to Staples this morning. You
just download the recipes, you upload them to Staples. It's
like twenty four cents of sheet. It's not that expensive

(21:14):
even if you're printing like on card stock, and that's
a great way to go. Another question is our sheet
protectors are somewhat unique in that they don't have the
extra white line closest to the rings. And that is
because in order to stay organized, I want to be
able to see my tabs in my categories, and so

(21:36):
we sourced and found sheet protectors that don't have that,
and so you just three hole punch the recipe and
it slips into three hole punched sheet protector if you
buy sheep protectors from us. My best advice, because all
three ring or three whole punches can be a little different,
is to actually take an individual whole punch and punch

(21:59):
the holes where they are so that it's a perfect fit.
If you know, you know, we've had lots of people
write in about that. All right, reminder, we have a
more in depth class on building a recipe binder within
Recipe Club. We'd love to have you there. Like I said,
Recipe Club and the Recipe Binder are meant to work
with one another. They are great resources for reducing dinner

(22:20):
time decision fatigue and getting a system in place for dinner.
All right, finally, let's finish with the weekly Gimme five.
This is five things that have made my life easier
or more enjoyable this week. As you know, I've been
in binder world. I updated my sister's binder and naturally
came home and spent some time with my binder, and
I taught this big class that we put into Recipe Club.
So my label maker this is the best and most

(22:44):
reliable label maker I've used over the years. It's got
the most however, many thousands of reviews on Amazon. It's
the brand is Brother. It's not only been great for
updating my respue binder, but it's also been great for
spring cleaning and organizing. And with that, I like that
gold tape for my label maker. I like all of
them to be consistent, and it's only like ten bucks

(23:05):
and it works great. So I will. When we send
our give me five email tomorrow or as I update
our blog post on Kelcnixon dot com, you'll have a
link to both of those things. Next, at home printer.
I in the process of building this company, I have
printed thousands of recipes thousands, and I have gone through

(23:26):
three printers, mostly because I didn't like the first two,
and I have landed on the one that I really like.
It is not an inkjet printer. It is not going
to look like it came from a professional printer, but
it is completely adequate. It is reliable, and it does
not go through ink too fast, which that was one
of my biggest complaints. So that is something if you

(23:47):
if it's time for a printer update, I'm telling you
your life is easier with a printer. Maybe it's just
because I have kids. I print stuff every single day,
every single day. I love my printer. Okay. Next, I'm
prepping for Easter and noticed that I was a little
low on serving utensils. So I'm making a ton of
food this year, So if you were hosting and you

(24:10):
need a few extra serving utensils. I purchased this set,
like a Matte gold set, just off of Amazon. Really simple.
It was like twelve dollars tons of I think I
had seventeen thousand of us and they're beautiful, So think
about it. If you're hosting, make sure you've got enough
serving utensils, spoons, forks, tongs to do that. You'll always

(24:31):
be happy that you have those, and you buy them
once and you can use them year after year. Next,
as I was testing my Easter recipes, I pulled out
my food warming mat. This was a purchase I made
over Thanksgiving, and I was so glad I did. I
cannot believe it took this long for this product to exist.
It's like a mat that rolls up and you unroll
it and it keeps dishes warm. Think mashed potatoes, think

(24:53):
green beans, whatever it may be, and we will certainly
be pulling it out for our big Easter feast next weekend.
And then finally, I just wrapped up the Easter baskets.
So my approach to Easter baskets is always to focus
on getting them my kids things they need new underwear,
a new swimsuit, always, a new pair of sandals, toothbrush,

(25:17):
toothpast situation. I usually get them each a journal and
a dress or a tie to where to Easter service
at church. That and then candy. So it's fun stuff.
I mean, I don't know how fun my thirteen year
old son thinks that is, but it's you know, it's
stuff they need, it's stuff they'll use, and it's still

(25:38):
kind of contributes to the magic of coming down and
seeing those Easter baskets. We always hide ours, do you
guys do that? It's h I grew up so the
Easter Bunny would hide Easter baskets and you'd have to
look all around to find them. All right, that's it
for today. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast so
that you never miss an episode. It's always meant to
be just a quick twenty to thirty minute listen while
you map out your own meals for the week. Listening

(25:59):
to a podcast well imeial plan has always been part
of my own system, and so I try to put
out something that's a really good fit for that. Next week,
we're going to do kitchen office hours. Answer your questions,
and so if you have any questions you'd like me
to answer, don't hesitate sending them my way via a
DM or email and I'll look forward to answering them.
Thanks so much for listening today. I'm so glad you're here.

(26:21):
Until next time, happy cooking. I'm Kelsey and look forward
to chatting with you. All next week,