From the way I organize my recipes to the way I clean my kitchen, I’ve got a system. It drives much of the Hectic Family nuts! But my systems provide structure and efficiency that’s very comforting. I know I won’t forget things when they’re on a checklist. I also know when I’m searching for something, my systems provide a framework that accelerates the process. My systems save me time. More importantly, my sanity!
One of the key component to many of my systems is Evernote.
What is Evernote?
I’ve heard Evernote described a lot of different ways. Most commonly it’s called a database. At that point, eyes glaze over and you’re bored. Worse yet, folks write off Evernote as one of those techy things and never burrow deeper. Relax, Evernote isn’t really a database, it’s more of an electronic  filing cabinet. Have a photo of your favorite kind of grapes? Save it. Want to save that awesome Crepes Suzette recipe you saw? Store it in Evernote. Did Grandma to tell you how she makes those awesome pancakes? Pump it into Evernote.Â
Evernote doesn’t really care what you throw at it. It’s a filing cabinet, so you can put lots of different things into it. Anything in digital form can go in there.Â
But it does a physical filing cabinet one better. You know that Crepes Suzette recipe? If you print it you can only file it in one place in a physical filing cabinet. It’s under Dessert or French Food. You’re limited to one place to store that recipe. But in Evernote you can use tags to essentially file the recipe in multiple places at once. And since you can apply as many tags as you like to a particular note, you can file it in lots of places. When you search for a specific tag, Evernote will find all the notes with that tag. Search for Dessert and you’ll find your Crepes Suzette. Search for French Food…boom, you’ve got it. Since you can also search on text within the recipe, you don’t even have to remember the whole name. Search for Crepes and you’ll still find it. Life doesn’t get much easier than that!
What are the benefits of using Evernote?
Searching is one of the biggest benefits of Evernote. You don’t have to be all that careful in your filing, especially since you can search all the text in a note.
Better still, Evernote is cross-platform. Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS devices…in any combination…share the same data. You can use a native app or a web-interface in whatever browser you prefer. In short, all your data is available wherever you are on whatever platform you choose.
Using Evernote in the Kitchen
There are four ways that I use Evernote for my kitchen:
Recipe storage tops my list. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve accumulated a load of recipes. And cookbooks. Oh my, do I have cookbooks. Having all those resources is awesome, until I want to find a particular recipe. While I’ve got a really good memory, there’s simply no way I can remember where everything is. So I end up on this frantic, fruitless quest searching for the holy grail of recipes and falling short. That is, until I started scanning recipes into Evernote.
Now my recipes live in Evernote. Finding a specific is easy-peasy. It’s also straightforward to share recipes when one of the kids asks for Grandma’s Chicken Casserole recipe. I open up Evernote, find it, and share it. I’ve had far too many emergency texts from the grocery store…but since I can share them effortlessly, it’s fine.
The next logical step after collecting and organizing my recipes is creating a meal plan from them. I’ve created an Evernote template with days of the week along with separate sections for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. When I’m on my game, I collect the recipes I’m preparing that week in one place. Rather than copying the recipes, I copy links and put them into the meal plan. When I’m ready to prepare a recipe I don’t have to search for it, I just click on the link.
I also use the meal plan to generate my shopping list. I extract the ingredients from the recipes and they go onto the shopping list. If I’m at the store and something isn’t clear to me, I pop into Evernote and look at the actual recipe. That’s saved my bacon on several occasions…especially where I forgot to include the quantity of something on my shopping list. Yup, I make mistakes just like everybody else!
The most innovative use of Evernote is our food inventory. We’re still pretty new to this process, but when it works it’s totally amazing. Rather than saving our leftovers in the refrigerator and hoping that we’ll eat them before they go bad, we’ve been packaging them in foil containers, labeling them (this is key), and storing them in the freezer. Before the boxes go in the freezer, I add the container contents and size to an Evernote inventory of freezer items. Because we have more than one freezer, I also include the location. So the note contains: Lasagna, Quart-size, Garage Freezer, 2nd Shelf. During the meal planning process I include some freezer meals into our regular rotation. When I’m really swamped I’ve been known to draw my entire week’s meal plan from freezer meals. It’s so nice to be able to do this from an Evernote document rather than standing at the freezer digging around to see what we have in stock.
We’re also working to do the same thing with our pantry. Eventually I’d like to integrate my shopping list with my pantry list…but I’m not quite there yet.
Wrap-Up
Evernote is an awesome general purpose tool. It’s great for storing things in digital form that would otherwise reside in a filing cabinet or on scraps and stacks of paper. Because it’s searchable and allows for multiple organization schemes, it works no matter what state my mind is in. The portability and universal accessibility makes it an awesome solution, even when I’ve forgotten to prepare myself before going out on errands.
Applying Evernote to my kitchen has made things a lot easier. From recipes to meal planning through grocery shopping and our food inventory, I’m able to do things a lot more efficiently.
Have you thought about using something like Evernote to make it a great day in the kitchen? If not, it’s something you might want to think about!
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