Organising my recipes

I know you are all well aware that I have a slight cookbook problem - which is ongoing by the way and shows no signs of letting up, but I also have a general recipe problem. 

Until recently I had stockpiled about 6-7 years worth of food magazines, that was about 300 of them. I had wanted to keep them all but the space they took up was getting a bit ridiculous so I decided to have a massive cull, tear out the recipes I wanted and file them.

Sounds easy doesn't it? It wasn't. I decided in my wisdom to categorize my recipes into such subjects like Halloween, savoury baking, side dishes, picnic food, soups, jams, alcoholic drinks... Yes, a little bit over-the-top but imagine how easy it will be to look for recipe inspiration... It's taken me forever to do this job and I'm still not finished. 300 magazines worth of recipes plus ones I've printed off blogs and torn out of newspapers etc, well that's an awful lot of organising, never mind the fact that I am inserting each and every one into a punched plastic pocket. The guy on the till in Wilkinsons looked like I was as mad as a hatter when I bought 1,000 plastic pockets the other week.  I'm well on my way but they're filling up 5 lever arch files so far. Still the bright side is that the lever arch files take up way less space.

One of the problems I came across was when the recipe was double-sided. You know, a chicken curry on one side and a Christmas pudding on the other *HORROR* This had the potential to muck-up my entire filing system or force me into having to choose which recipe I liked the most, and I really try not to play favourites...  But then I had a brainwave! 

You may have seen my posts a few months ago (or may not but here they - here and here) but I received a Fujitsu ScanSnap colour scanner to review. *DING* like a lightbulb over my head I had the great idea of scanning in the recipe so I could make a copy of the other side. I have in the past tried scanning recipes but never to great success as the text always came out a bit blurred so I didn't know how it was going to turn out.

I needn't have worried, the ScanSnap did me proud! The clarity and colour was excellent and the text was perfect! In fact I couldn't really believe just how well the recipes scanned.

I was rather impressed and my conundrum about double-sided recipes was solved thanks to my ScanSnap scanner. I then obviously set about scanning a huge pile of recipes but as it only takes a few seconds to scan each one, it didn't take me too long. The next problem was printing them all...(Sorry for using all the ink Mr M. Whoops.)

I realise this is all slightly obsessive of me, but what can I say, I like things in order!

How about you? Do you have an elaborate filing system for your saved recipes? If so, please share as I'm still not completely happy with mine!