I’ve used my iPad not once, but twice today to cook not one, but two new recipes. While I had a moment of panic before I jumped, I don’t regret making the switch from OneNote to Evernote.
The search engines are so powerful you can search for a keyword inside a picture. How cool is that? This means you don’t have to put your recipes into individual folders. You can just have one folder called recipes – or whatever you want to call it, and dump all the recipes you clip, scan, copy or drag into it. Can we say, “major time saver?”
I have less than a dozen tags – and I’m using those to search for things key words wouldn’t pick up. Keywords will find ‘chicken’ or ‘beef’ or ‘crockpot’ or ‘soup’. So I didn’t bother adding those tags. Here are the tags I’ve found useful:
- Bread
- Easy Peasy -simple go-to recipes
- Mom’s Cookbook – I’m scanning all my mom’s recipes which include my Grandma’s too.
- Snacks and Desserts – Anything sweet
- Tried and True -My favorites
- Gluten Free – breads
- Breakfast
- Sides
- To Try –See below
Everything dumps into an “In Box” where I can tag it and move it to recipes at my leisure. If I feel a bit uncertain on the recipe I tag it ‘to try’. Once I’ve tried it, I’ll either delete it or tag it with any other tags that would apply and delete the ‘to try’ tag.
Evernote has platforms on the PC, iPad, and Android, which has me covered. I am excited to get the recipes from all their hiding places and have them in one organized place. Here’s where my various recipes are hidden:
- PDF’s I’ve accumulated and have stored on my hard drive waiting to be loved
- Cupboard above the stove – need I say more?
- My mom’s recipe box
- Websites – my favorite is Heavenly Homemaker
- OneNote – where I was originally storing some recipes
I figure it will take me some time to tackle this project, but, as the saying goes, “An elephant is eaten one bite at a time.” This brings me to the ways to import the files. Evernote gives you 60mb free each month to upload. If you buy their premium membership you would be able to upload 1g per month.
I found scans blew through the 60mb pretty quickly, but if you snatch up this little gem, you can easily clip recipes from web pages. I’ve found not copying over pictures saves on space. Sometimes I think it’s easier to do it the old fashioned way and copy and paste the text into Evernote myself.
My plan at this point is to scan 60mb each month and see this as an ongoing project. Sometimes when I have unlimited time and space, I procrastinate and don’t get anything accomplished. I’ll keep you updated on my progress.
My mind is starting to swirl at all the ways Evernote could be useful to me. How about you? Do you use it? Do you love it?
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