Never Lose Recipes Again With This Under-$5 Aldi Find

How do you save and organize recipes? Back in the olden days, when print newspapers were still the norm, I'd cut them out and store them in envelopes where they faded or were eventually lost. These days, I save online recipes using an app, but there's something to be said for the nostalgic appeal of carefully cutting out and pasting recipes of dubious delights, such as shrimp wiggle, or painstakingly handwriting them on index cards. Should you wish to adopt the charming practice of the latter — which will, admittedly, leave a much better legacy for your grandkids than old app data — Aldi's making it easy with a collection of Pembrook recipe tins complete with cards that will feature as one of next week's Aisle of Shame finds.

These recipe tins come in four different styles, each one more charming than the next: black-and-white line drawings of kitchen essentials, pink with a floral overlay, blue-and-white gingham, and off-white with a pattern of green leaves and lemons. The tabbed cards are sorted into six different categories: appetizers, bread and pasta, breakfast, desserts, eggs, and either beverages or meat. On one side, there's room to write the ingredients along with a few details about the recipe (name, prep and cook time, etc.), while the other side of the card is where the recipe goes. Each set of recipe tins sells for $4.99 and will be available from March 11 through 17.

If you can't resist a cute little recipe tin and card set, you may be wondering just how to use it once you get it home. If you only have a few recipes to save, or a whole lot of patience, you can always print them neatly, but be forewarned: There are only enough lines to write down 10 ingredients, so you'll either need to select shorter recipes or use teeny-tiny letters to squish in more than one ingredient per line. Likewise, if the recipe itself is a long one, you may have to write pretty small to fit all of the steps onto the back of an index card. Another option — if you have access to a printer — is to select the smallest readable font, then cut and paste the recipe onto the card.

Should your recipes tend to be lengthy, though, there's another option you may wish to consider. For that same $4.99 price, Aldi is also offering a selection of Pembrook recipe binders. These come in identical patterns to the tins, but inside, you get a notebook-sized page per recipe. Again, one side of the page is devoted to identifiers and ingredients, while the other is where you write (or glue) the recipe. As the pages appear to be significantly larger than the size of an index card, using a binder should give you plenty of room. Enough, in fact, for this extra-long beef birria recipe that calls for 17 ingredients, plus an additional five for the Mexican-style mirepoix relish.