New Recipe Book? Here’s How I Track My Recipes.

I love recipe books, and I love getting them for Christmas or going on vacation and finding new local recipe books. My most favorite recipe books are compilation books, where everyone from church or school contributes their favorite recipe, they’re compiled in a book, then you buy them for fundraising or at cost.

Recipe books accumulate in my bookshelf, so I guess you could say that I am a recipe book collector. Recently, I bought three whole30 recipe books – no, I’m not an ambassador for the program, but I’ve been doing the program. I thought it was a great example to show you how I track the new books in my bullet journal.

Here are the books I bought:

Now I’m slowly making my way through the food creations, tracking and recording in my bullet journal.

Watch the Flip-Through on How I Track My Recipes:

The Process for a New Cook Book

When I get a new recipe book, Before I start adding the list to my journal, I mark the pages in the recipe books and then forget which recipes I wanted to try. I go through every single page and mark each page with a recipe I want to try with a sticky note tag. Then I write the page number and the name of the recipe in my bullet journal in a list. I know when I write things down, I tend to remember them better.

Selecting Recipes

If a recipe doesn’t look tasty to me, I don’t try it. Sometimes I’ll go back and revisit the book and try new ones. I can create a new list or add to my current list. When I try the recipe, I mark it with a key to show me which recipes I liked and which ones I didn’t like very much.

I prefer my color keys to be very different in color. If I did all green or all red tones, or varying intensities of any given color, I would get confused with the ones I loved and the ones I didn’t like, so my colors are always varied.

Color Code Key

Using Tombow Dual Brush Markers, I assigned a color Key to this set of recipes:

Yellow Gold 026: YUM! The whole family loves – the quickest way for a recipe to land in the regular rotation.
Coral 873: I love – but the family doesn’t. That means I won’t make it as often. If I develop a particular craving for a recipe in this category, sometimes I declare a ‘fend for yourself night’ and indulge myself.
Gray Green 228: No Go – something that didn’t work at all
Orchid 623: We liked the recipe, but it requires a change to something in the recipe – I love to do this for recipes and customize them.

There are some weeks that I want to try all the new recipes and feel ambitious in the kitchen. There are other weeks that I don’t feel like cooking at all. So it’s nice to have a reference for when I want to try something new, and I don’t have to flip through all the pages in every recipe book each time I want to try something new.

What Do I Do With All the Recipes I Love?

If a recipe wins our hearts (and stomachs) or I modify the recipe enough to fit our style, I add it to our online recipe manager. I use Pepperplate.com, but I know AllRecipes.com has a recipe manager as well and there are some other choices for apps and digital recipe managers out there too. But I’ve used PepperPlate for years – I can’t even tell you how long. If they had an ambassador program, I’d jump on that boat so fast. My husband and I both have the app and we can access the recipes and ingredients. I love their meal scheduler and shopping list creator. Plus you can import recipes from different sites.

Additional Layout idea

There are so many ways to track recipes. I would LOVE to make a recipe journal. Either write out the recipes by hand or create a visual diary of the recipe. One Thanksgiving I made a spread highlighting delicious food. It’s still one of my favorite spreads to date. Here’s the mouthwatering video: