Today I want to talk for a minute about saving money by collecting and organizing. You can get a lot of things for free, that is true. I am mostly talking about good recipes here. However, I do have a few favorite recipe books and I think it is worth making a collection of recipes and recipe books which you can refer to often.

Having your collection organized is really the key to quick easy cheap meals. For example, I often make some type of quick bread for breakfast. Instead of thumbing through cookbooks to find the one I want, I have made a binder of breakfast recipes. In that binder I have a section for quick breads, for oven-baked pancakes (dutch baby), etc. Then all I have to do in the morning is grab that binder and start baking. It is wonderfully fast and easy.

When my grandmother passed away, I inherited all her cookbooks. What a treasure! Not only could I now re-create old favorites I enjoyed at her house, but it added to my variety of recipes and my cooking knowledge. These are not very organized, however, and I must spend some time going through them and figure out how to organize them so that the ones I want to use are quick and easy to find.