Do you regularly wonder what to cook for yourself and your family? Do you run out of ideas only to be reminded of a family favorite you have long since forgotten about? Here is a really clever way of keeping together a lot of recipes and not forgetting your favorites.

Put all your meal plans or recipes on single pieces of paper. This may mean photocopying from books or printing out websites. Then get a 3-ring binder with some sheet protectors inside. Put one recipe or meal suggestion on each page. They don’t have to be elaborate recipes, just everyday things that you regularly cook.

Each time you go shopping buy the ingredients for the next 2 or 3 or 7 days depending on how frequently you want to go shopping, then each day look at the next menu and that’s what you cook for dinner. If the family really doesn’t like something you can remove it from your binder and you can add new recipes in at any time. While you are cooking, the recipe is protected against splashes in the plastic binder.

If you wish, you can have a separate section at the back for desserts, but the general idea is just to have a book of meal suggestions. I do make sure that similar recipes aren’t together, I like to rotate amongst chicken, fish, beef and vegetarian and that adds enough variety to the meals.

The advantage of this method is that you are not browsing multiple cookbooks searching for a recipe, you have all your meal plans in one place and when the children ask, “What’s for dinner?” You always have an answer.