Guest Blogger: Recipe Planning with Pages by KC

We're so excited to have Kobi (AKA @pagesbykc) join us again for another guest blog! Kobi has been cooking up a storm and has put together a few tips on recipe organising for us all. Recipe planning is a great way to keep treasured family recipes, fave finds from the internet, recommendations from friends and to try new things in the kitchen. Read on for Kobi's recipe planning tips and tricks:

Hi again WashiGang Crew!

I’m back to share another blog post, this time about the new Happy Planner Recipe Organiser. Being in lockdown for the past few months, I’ve taken on quite a few new projects (probably too many!). One of these has been organising all of my recipes.If you are like me, your recipes are all over the place! I have some of my favourites in old recipe books, print outs of online recipes, magazine cuttings, some saved on my iPad and the most important of all, handwritten recipes from my grandmother. My Nan was the most amazing cook and I have some of her handwritten recipes in an old notebook.I decided that I wanted to create a recipe book of all our favourite recipes that would become a family heirloom. I want to pass down the recipe book to my daughter. With them all organised in a beautiful book, our family favourites can be passed down for generations to come!

The new Happy Planner recipe book is so beautiful! I love how it looks in my kitchen. I added rose gold metal discs to mine, to ensure it stands the test of time. In the front there is a handy conversion table too. And of course the photographs and dividers are beautiful. What you will need  – 

• A Happy Planner Recipe Organiser – I love the new one – it is so beautiful and the recipe pages are plain, so you can decorate them how you like!
• Happy Planner sticker books – the food and recipe books are great to add some decorative elements to your pages.
• Washi tape – I have some beautiful food washi tape that I’ve added to my recipe pages.
• Photos or a photo printer, if you would like to add photos to the pages – I love my Canon Selphy because of the convenience of printing at home.
• Markers – Tombow or Crayola Supertips are great for adding colour to your headers.

Some handy tips – 

1. Make a list of all of the recipes you would like to include – go through your old magazines, check online, old recipe books etc. As you add a new recipe you can tick it off your list.
2. Organise the recipes in to categories – in the recipe organiser it has the following sections – favourites, main dishes, side dishes, soups and salads, healthy, breakfast, desserts and miscellaneous. When I’m finished, I plan to make a master list of all the recipes in each section and add it to the front of the book.
3. Print or cut out photos for each recipe. I sometimes take photos of the food we have actually cooked and sometimes I download photos from google. Magazine cutouts work great too. Photos make the book look super professional! 
4. Add washi tape and/or stickers to decorate! The fun part! I usually do this first and then write the ingredients and directions around the decoration.

I’ve also added a page to the front of my recipe organiser, to track when we have tried new recipes. That’s the beauty of the Happy Planner system, you can punch extra pages and use them as needed. I also plan to punch some of my nan’s handwritten recipes and pop them in the back, in memory of her. I hope you enjoyed this post and found it helpful. I have such fond memories of cooking with my grandmother when I was younger and food is such an important part of every family! Please pop over to my Instagram page www.instagram.com/pagesbykc if you have any questions or would like to say hello!

Thank you so much for tuning in! Have you been adding to your recipe planner lately? Tell us about one of your favourite recipes! Maybe we can even share some recipes in the comments with each other?