Using Evernote in the Kitchen to Organize Your Recipes

I've written about how I use Google is to whip up new recipes that catch my fancy and offer my household more interesting homemade meals.

One of the other technology tools I find indispensable in my kitchen is Evernote. Besides using it to write - as I am now, I also use it to organize the recipes that I've tried and want to repeat, or new ones that I want to try. Even on the go. The trick of course is in how little time it takes for me to put in the recipes and how simple it is for me to pull them out.

How do you organize all the recipes in a easy use and searchable manner?

Evernote
Evernote is a free web-application with a desktop counterpart. You can use it to store information in the cloud, just like Google Docs. Or, you can download it to install into your computer. The beauty of it is that wherever you caputre your information, you'll be able to find it later because it'll sync back into your Evernote account. Everything you put into Evernote is always synchronized across all of your devices, the Windows PC in the office, your iPhone, the MacBook the kitchen or the desktop in the study. Evernote will capture literally anything. See a recipe at your mate's you want to try later that week? Take a snapshot of it on your phone and send it to your Evernote email account. Word documents, scanned pictures, PDFs, URLs, it will take anything you throw at it.

Evernote in the Kitchen: The Hack
The secret to using Evernote successfully in the kitchen is in the search. After I've captured the recipes, I tag them with keywords like breakfast, chicken, dessert, drinks, or even types of cuisine; Italian, Chinese, Japanese. So when I feel like having Italian for dinner on monday, I'll call up "Italian" and "chicken" in the search box.

But that's not all. Evernote's search capabilities extend to character recognition. Evernote can search PDFs, pictures, document for keywords within the pictures themselves. It can search an image for words that are within itself. Let's say I took a snapshot of a Chocolate Crinkle recipe I saw in the Sunday papers at the library last week and I'm up to it this weekend. In my Evernote Recipe notebook, I search for "Crinkle". Evernote will be able to recognize "Crinkle" within the newspaper cutout I snapped.

An Extra Tip
Here's another good reason to use Evernote in your kitchen. You can take your grocery list with you anywhere. You could show your mate a great recipe you've tried on your iPhone or Blackberry, with all the ingredients and directions on how to be like the kitchen goddess you are. You could whip it up at the supermarket and if you've forgotten to grab the shopping list on your fridge.

I've tried other recipe software and the old notebook in the past and Evernote still comes up tops because I don't have to copy down recipes on flimsy pieces of papers. I love that I can access all my recipes from anywhere on my Evernote account and that its search function extends even to images.