Introducing Binder-Ready Recipes

Every single week, I try out new recipes from food bloggers for my family, while also keeping some on regular rotation. I really love trying new recipes, and I’ve learned so much by doing this.

When I first got married, I had basically zero cooking experience, and my husband ended up doing almost all the cooking (and he was/is very good at it!). I got into cooking slowly, by heating pasta and a pre-made jar of sauce and mixing them. I was terrified of cooking chicken due to an unfortunate food poisoning experience from a party I went to, which landed me in a hospital bed for five days!

Now, I’ll happily try almost any recipe. I avoid birthday cakes with fondant (it’s never perfect enough for my liking!) and shrimp (my husband’s anaphylaxis makes me genuinely fearful of being even near them in someone else’s cart at the supermarket checkout!)

I love to cook from a few cookbooks, I regularly turn to the NY Times Cooking app, but mainly I cook from food blogs.

But cooking from a screen has never been a great experience for me. Trying to scroll up and down through a recipe when my hands are covered in flour, raw chicken juice, or meatball mixture isn’t ideal. I’m forever cleaning my iPhone screen.

And, my screen is just too small to see everything at a glance. I also have to keep switching apps to set/turn off timers. I live by the timer. (The number of times I’ve put something in the oven and the alarm has gone off and I’m momentarily confused about why it’s shocking!).

So a few years ago, I bought a ring binder and started putting my favourite recipes into plastic sleeves to keep them clean. It worked, but as a designer, I didn’t love how the recipes printed.

The number one issue was the clunky page breaks. Oftentimes, there would only be one or two lines on a page by itself, or the text was way too small (or big). Sometimes the images were too big, or there was a lot of color (in the end, I always printed in black and white… ink is expensive!). While the recipes were 5-star, the printed recipes were anything but a high-end cookbook feel.

So I made my own template and would copy and paste my favorite recipes before printing them off.

That template idea turned into Binder-Ready Recipes, a service that reformats food bloggers’ recipes into professional, print-ready PDFs. Compact layouts, easy-to-read text, proper fractions, and a QR code back to the original post. This is something worth keeping on the kitchen counter.

If you know a food blogger who’d love this, or if that’s you, I’d love for you to take a look!