I'm going through the Core 2000 at the moment and I'm not sure if I am "doing it right" for the Kana -> Kanji cards.

What I do is I just listen to the sentences (or I read them) and see if I can understand what they mean.
I've gonna through all of Tae Kim and only now do I realized that if you were to ask me to write say べんきょう (study - one of the first words I learned) in its kanji form I wouldn't be able to.

Though when I see 勉強 I know what it is immediately.

The "problem" is the only way I can really practice remembering the kana->kanji would be to write everything out... which would take for ever. I vague remembering AJATT saying that you don't need to worry about this.. but I just wanted to double check with the community

When I first did it, I wrote out every word. I'd recommend anyone starting out to do this. Later, I began writing in my head and just wrote out the words I missed. Now, I just write it out in my head (well, I picture the kanji in my head).

If you're comfortable with writing out kanji, perhaps just write out words you can't picture in your head. This will make your passive reading very strong. I think the reason is you strongly connect the yomi to the kanji by doing this. That will not happen very well if you just did Kanji word reviews.

I don't write out anything, and I haven't really ever written anything out ( for japanese) ever really yet except RTK which I have been reviewing for nearly a year now. The way I do it is just reading recognition, I have found this is very efficient to getting to the threshold level where it is easy to enjoy reading. But also to make sure I do not make mistakes with similar looking jukugo I have a vocab deck which contains most of the vocab from my sentences as well as some special words of interest, such as historical terms, geography stuff, science stuff. I really recommend a vocab deck, although it might be against what almighty khatz has said you will certainly be able to read and enjoy things much more quickly than in doing sentences alone.(All imo oc)