Evernote aka The Way I Organize My Recipes

I know a couple of you are now addicted to Pinterest!  Yay!  I really do love it, although now that we've moved to a small apartment and I am temporarily free from all the cleaning I'm used to doing  I spend too much time on Pinterest!  I love Pinterest as a visual way to organize things I like. As Beth said, it has saved me from bookmarking everything on my computer.   I like finding new recipes on Pinterest, but the downside is accessing them.  To access them, I need to log into my pinterest account, find the board I've posted the recipe on, click on the picture to take me to the original website, and read the recipe from there.  So although I find many recipes and pin them on pinterest, I usually go to the original post and clip them to Evernote for faster, easier access.

Evernote is similar to Pinterest in that it is a way to save any ideas you come across on the web.  The differences, in my opinion, are that Evernote enables you to save way more text along with the picture.  So you can save your entire recipe.  You can also make quick notes, record voice notes, scan pictures or receipts or other info into Evernote, etc.  You organize all your info into "notebooks" (again, similar to pinterest).  But the reason I am in love with Evernote (beyond being able to save alot of text) is that I can clip things into evernote from my computer and it automatically syncs to my ipad and iphone.  When I am cooking, I use the ipad or iphone to view the recipe and it is as easy to access as any other app.  In the grocery store, I can view my recipe and buy ingredients needed.  So that's a really wordy explanation of Evernote, and I'm sure I've made it about as clear as mud!!  For more info, go to evernote.com to read about it.  You download to your pc or mac from evernote.com and then you get the app for your smartphone or ipad from the app store (my husband has a windows based phone and he can get the app; I'm not sure which phones it's compatible with).

In the past, I had a 3-ring binder that I used to store recipes.  Some are handwritten, many are printed from the internet, and some are cut out from magazine.  I like this method so much better and I am slowly transitioning my binder of recipes over to evernote.  I am all for any thing that saves storage space, and I like being able to make menu plans (I have a notebook for that too) while waiting at the doctor's office or anywhere.  If I am not crazy about a recipe I just delete it.

Here's a picture of Evernote open on my ipad and some of my notebooks (click on photo to see larger):

 Here's my ipad with my "recipes- main dishes" notebook open and you can see the recipe for chicken salad at the bottom:

 Here's a screenshot of evernote on my computer with the icons from some of my notes on the left side and my note for Cincinnati Chili open on the right:

 Here is a screenshot of evernote.com: