Why Every Home Ec. Class & Cook Should Use Evernote...

While cooking cookies with my kids on Father's day, I was fumbling through my wife's recipe box looking for a recipe for No Bake Cookies. Then I realized what an antiquated system this recipe box was. There are a handful of sites on the web that bring digital indexing and searching to recipes but for the most part those are for recipes that are on that website, not your personal recipes.

That's when it occurred to me that Evernote is a fantastic solution. You can create a note for

each recipe. Inside of each note you could then use a smartphone or webcam to take a picture of the recipe card, or the notes could have the recipe transcribed from the card and typed into Evernote by hand. Evernote has handrwriting/text recognition software for pictures. This means that you can search through your Evernote notebook and the search will include all the info written in the pictures of the recipe cards.

The big picture here is that, in theory, you could open Evernote, run a search by any ingredient, name, or other keyword and pull up all the recipes that apply to your search.

Next, to make your recipe search even more robust, in the future when you use another website like Epicurious or Allrecipes.com to discover new recipes you can send the recipes that you like to your Evernote and continue to build an arsenal of recipes to your repertoire.

Now when you are ready to cook, you can use your ipad, laptop, or smartphone to search and follow any recipe that you want to use. Not to mention, all your recipes are now backed up in the cloud. So no need to worry about spilling on, lending, or losing a recipe. All your recipes are available to you anytime, anywhere that you have an internet connection.

But what if you don't always have an internet connection? Well there are some great internet tools out there like blurb.com that will print hard-bound books of your digital projects. In fact, this would be an awesome project. Have your class or group collecting and entering into Evernote their favorite recipes. The Evernote notebook could be shared among the group. The group could then review the recipes, add comments, perhaps even remove some of the recipes. The final product could be a killer recipe book created by the class/group as a collaborative work.

Give it a shot, you'll love it.

Stay tuned for blog posts as I digitize my wife's recipe box.