A dinner book is something that I created shortly after moving out when I was cooking for 4 teenagers. Trying to co-ordinate tastes and schedules was proving a royal pain so I emptied my geography binder, three hole punched my recipe cards, articles & printouts and began sorting them by ingredients.

I re-labelled my dividers to read: poultry, veggie, cheese, beef, pork, fish. Each week I would pick 6 dishes and bring them to the front of the binder. I would scan the ingredients making a grocery list as I went. Then I just trained my roomies to look in the ‘dinner book’ instead of pestering me. And if there was something they wanted for supper they just put the recipe in the front of the binder or a post-it on the edge of the recipe.

In theory (and for a while in practice) it worked pretty good but I was finding doing it every week was a pain so I came up with my new and improved dinner book that I have been using for five years now.

I went through my recipes and threw them out. Well most of them ones I had never tried or made in my recent memory. I kept only the tried, tested & true. My goal was to get just over 30 recipes to turn my once weekly chore into a monthly one. Now I have this wonderful book with only the best dinner recipes in it I tied a long string around the bottom ring and it serves as my book mark so each week I flip it open, scan ingredients and away I go. If I want to try a new recipe I usually do it at the beginning of the week or the day after I do my shopping, if it passes I type it out, three hole punch it and it gets a place in the binder. I also ‘purge’ it occasionally and ditch recipes that I have memorized or don’t eat so much anymore.

Short on recipe ideas? Try this. She will provide you with complete meal plans for over three months for the price of a cheap recipe book. The kicker – they are kid friendly and complete with grocery lists. Yeah. Pretty sure she rocks and you should definitely consider checking out her site here this.

Staying at home with the kids I have discovered a fatal flaw in my above plan….there are 3 meals in a day! So the ‘dinner’ book just doesn’t cut it. My new plan? It is a piece of paper on the side of my fridge divided into 3 sections – Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. I brainstormed every meal idea I could think of and wrote it down in it’s appropriate section(some lunch ideas could be dinner and vice versa but I am sure you get the picture). Under each idea I wrote the ingredients required and, if necessary, the location of the recipe. It works quite well because with a quick glance I can find a meal idea and quickly see if we do in fact have all the ingredients. You can view my ‘meal list’ here some of the recipes are even located on my site.

Please feel free to with recipe in the subject line. I will make it at home (just to taste..I mean test) and then check back in roughly a month to see your recipe on this page. Really good recipes will be featured in my newsletter.

So here they are....in all their glory....near and dear to my heart....my dinner book recipes. Enjoy.