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The application of the year, in my opinion, is Evernote. Evernote is, especially for people who like to cook, an amazing tool to help manage recipes that you find in various places online. I used to browse so many food blogs and websites that had tons of recipes that looked good, so many that there wasn't time to make them all. If a recipe looked good for a party, for example, but I didn't have a party coming up, I wouldn't know how to save that page and I would eventually forget that I ever saw the recipe. When my next party would come around I would have to start from scratch looking for good appetizer ideas.
Evernote fixes that problem for me. Whenever I see a recipe I think looks good on any website, I simply save it as a note and organize it into a recipe folder on Evernote. Evernote is a free program that you can download to your computer or access online (or both) and save notes. I started using it a while back when I came across an article on 9 Lists to Keep Updated and Handy and Brian showed me Evernote as a good way to start lists. There is an iPhone app for Evernote too, so you can update the notes on your phone and sync them with your account online and your computer. I started keeping these lists and after a while I learned more about what Evernote can do, and I learned that you can save web page content as notes by installing a Firefox plugin that puts a little elephant icon on the top of your browser. See like this:
When you click on that elephant, the content of the note will be saved to your Evernotes. It's pretty cool. That is how I save recipes now. You can create lots of different note libraries to organize your notes, and then tag them in categories. Here are my note libraries:
Every time I save a recipe, I just select to put it in my recipe library, and then I put a tag on it based on the type of recipe it is. I have different categories that I created myself like Chicken, Desserts, Things We Loved, Make this week, etc.
So, when I want to make something, like a dessert for example, I can simply click on my dessert tag and find something that I have already collected instead of starting from scratch and finding a recipe on the internet. The recipe pops up right in my very own recipe catalog. I don't have to go back to the internet to find the recipe since it's already saved in my catalog, but just in case I want to go back and visit the site, the link to the site is incorporated into the recipe. Very cool, right?
So, if you are a recipe reader who never remembers where they saw that awesome looking recipe for brown sugar buttercream or jerk chicken (like I am) then this is something you should try. Evernote is also really helpful for making grocery lists, especially if you have an iPhone, since you can look up your list right on your phone once you get to the store. I just make my list on my computer at home and then open the list once I'm out in the world. It saves paper and it's super easy. Have fun note-taking!
