Organization: Recipes

One of the small tasks I wanted to accomplish this new year was to organize my cookbooks and recipe box.  Since I've been trying new recipes for the last few months, I had amassed quite a collection of 8 1/2x11 printouts of recipes and it was driving me crazy.

My mom gave me this recipe box at one of my wedding showers 10 years ago and I only had a few remaining blank recipe cards left, so I ordered some new cards off amazon.

I copied all of the recipes that I had tried on Friday and laminated them yesterday.  Look how pretty!

Then I put all of the recipes I have yet to try in plastic folders so they at least look neat and tidy.

I also went through my cookbook and looked to see if there were any that I wouldn't use and could give away.  I found 2 or 3 small ones that I had gotten at the grocery store on sale that I realized none of the recipes look appetizing to me.  Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the recipes are great...they just don't look appetizing to me, the fairly picky eater.  So I didn't clean out the books that much, but just to declutter al of the paper is great!

Now I should be able to easily find all of the new recipes we've recently tried without having to pull out a huge stack of papers.

My next task in this area is to slowly start to go through the cookbooks and make a list of recipes I want to try.  This will obviously be an ongoing task.  Maybe I can try to do a cookbook every one or 2 months.  What do you do?  Do you just pick up a different cookbook every week and decide right then what to cook?  I plan meals on a weekly basis, but I feel like I need to do by the month.  Is that normal or is that just me going a little overboard?