Recipe Binder

I'm curious. How do you keep track of your recipes?

I've kept my recipes in a document folder on my computer for a long time, but I found that I was printing them out each time I wanted to use a particular recipe so I wouldn't have to take my laptop into the kitchen. See, I'm a messy cook. And I don't want to ruin my laptop. But printing out the recipes each time I used one got to be a pain and a waste of paper.

So, last year I started a recipe binder. I purchased a small binder (5 1/2 x 8 1/2) and a small 3-hole punch and began filling it up. I did good for a while, but like most things, it began to get messy as I got lazy.

Here's the mess I have created:

This morning I was reading some of the blogs I like to follow and I came across this post at Clean Mama. It was the inspiration I needed to tackle my recipe binder and get it organized before school begins. Wow, I can’t believe how dirty this binder was. This picture looks better than it really was:

First things first, I want my binder to be pretty. After making the binder front for my son (that he surely won’t use), I decided my recipe binder needed a pretty look. So I fooled around a bit and came up with this:

Much better, don’t you think? So now I need to get it organized. I know I have dividers somewhere around here. I just need to figure out what categories I want to divide the recipes into. Should I go with Chicken, Beef, Etc. Or by cooking methods like Freezer, Crockpot, Grilling? Or perhaps a mix of both along with a Favorites tab?