E-mailing to Evernote for Menu Planning and Kitchen Organization

Evernote is great for organizing recipes and menu planning. Another way to use the ubiquitous tech tool is straight from your e-mail account.

Every Evernote account comes along with a unique Evernote e-mail address. 

Go into your Evernote desktop client. Select the help menu and then Go to My Account Page.

This will open an internet browser window. Look at the Email Notes to section and you'll see your unique Evenote e-mail address. It will be some iteration of your username @m.evernote.com.

Now when you get something interesting in your e-mail inbox, you're just a few clicks from sending it to your Evernote account.

My cousin sent me an e-mail for Arroz con Pollo, Puerto Rican chicken and rice. I wanted to save this recipe and I knew I wanted to blog about it.

Save the unique Evernote e-mail address in your contacts so you don't need to memorize it. I saved it as Evernote Account. When I start typing Evernote, the address autofills from my contacts.

You'll want to edit the subject line to make sure that the contents of the e-mail [which will become the body of the note] end up exactly where you want them to.

The title of this note will be Arroz con Pollo. Use that @ symbol to dictate what notebook the e-mail will end up in. This note is going to the cooking notebook. The # symbol stands for tags when you're e-mailing into your Evernote account, so this note will be tagged chicken, rice, and dinner.

Happy organization!

Favorite Food Blogs

There are so many great blogs that make me want to learn more about cooking, tech, and lots of other random things. These are some of my favorite food-specific blogs. There's so much inspiration on the web. Check out these gems.

A Year of Slow Cooking: I've mentioned this blog a lot before. It started my obsession with my crock pot and inspired the baked oatmeal I make nearly every week. Stephanie O'Dea used her slow cooker everyday in 2008 and the blog lives on.

Simply So Good: This is a home cook living in Utah who takes beautiful pictures of her creations. Her blog inspired me to try no-knead bread.

Food Wishes: Chef John writes up all his recipes, but he also films a lot of them. Check out his YouTube channel if you're a visual learner like me.

The Kitchn: Pretty pictures got me again, but there's so much more to the Kitchn, including great explanations on how to use cooking tools and great housing-keeping and cleaning ideas.

Eater: If you live in New York City or are planning a trip, check out Eater. My husband introduced me to the site--it's less of a traditional blog and more of a full-fledged website.

Shredded Chicken For Many Recipes

There are some really smart people on the interwebs. A pin on Pinterest suggested using a KitchenAid mixer to prepare shredded chicken. I took this one step further and used my crockpot to cook a bunch of chicken breast--making the whole process even easier. There are so many recipes that call for chicken, so why not make a lot of head of time?

Ingredients & Tools

• boneless, skinless chicken
• slow cooker
• standing mixer

Cook the chicken on low in your slow cooker for 2-4 hours, depending on the amount of chicken. This should be "naked" chicken. Add the seasoning you need to the specific recipes once you're actually making it.

Allow the chicken to cool completely. Add it to the mixing bowl. There's no need for any kind of liquid.

Start at the lowest setting. The shredding took less than a minute and I only increased it to the third setting. This was so simple.

I used some of the chicken right away in my middle eastern salad. The rest is in the freezer for an easy weeknight dinner.

Organize Recipes with Evernote Clipper

You could use bookmarks to save the recipes you find online, but you can't access them unless you're on your computer. You could use Pinterest, but once I pin, I quickly forget what I saved, where, and I'm not in the habit of going back to check. I've never been someone to collect physical paper copies of recipes, so the solution for organizing recipes has to be a digital one for me.

I've confessed my love for all things tech and Evernote especially for menu planning in a previous post. I have a menu tag for day to day cooking organization, but I use a recipes tag as an archive and Evernote clipper helps me save my inspiration in about three clicks.

Evernote Clipper is a browser extension. It's available for Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. An extension is like an app for your browser. The downloaded extension, or web app, literally adds a button to your browser, making common online tasks easier and faster.

When I come across a recipe I'd like to try, I click on the Evernote elephant and I get a new window.

Let's say I'm browsing online and come across this recipe [the source of the Wonder Bread].

I can click on the Evernote elephant and get a new window. I like the extension best on Chrome because it pre-populates some of the fields and it's usually accurate. This has given the title of the article as the suggested title of the note and correctly tagged it as recipes. Some of the extensions in other browsers don't have these options.

If you don't like the suggested title or if you want to add tags, you can do that all from this window. There's no copying and pasting into Evernote.

And that's it! I can open up Evernote on my desktop, Android, or iPad and the note is there. If you're even more organizationally savvy, you can use more specific tags like breakfast or slow cooker. Right now, I have all of my recipes in my main notebook, but I may need to create a separate cooking notebook.

Happy clipping!

Evernote for Menu Planning

I am a tech nerd. I read tech news, tech blogs, and watch a lot of tech videos. This isn't a screen addiction; I don't need to be constantly staring at my phone or checking e-mail. I like to learn about how apps and services can make me a more organized, together person. One such app is Evernote.

If you aren't already familiar with it, Evernote, at its simplest, is a note-taking system. You can access it on the web, on your mobile device, or on their software. I use all three platforms, thank you very much. It makes menu planning very simple for me.  Your notes can be text, pictures, or sound.  Check out this vlog [video blog] for the Evernote basics.

I use three notes constantly: menu database, this week's menu, and next week's menu. These are the titles of my notes--you can call your notes anything you like.

In my menu database note, I keep a living list of all the recipes I like and can make well. Whenever I'm stumped about what to make, I refer to this list. As I experiment with new recipes and find ones I like, I add to the list. I keep the hyperlinks of the websites where I find the recipes for future reference.

This week's menu is a well-named note: here is everything I'm making this week. When my brain gets clogged with the happenings of day to day life, it's a reminder. Evernote on each platform has great sharing resources, so I can easily e-mail my husband our week's menu.  He's very smart; he always says it looks delicious.

If I'm standing in line somewhere or if some culinary inspiration hits at a random time of day, I go to the next week's menu note on my phone and add my idea. This also serves as my shopping list towards the end of the week.

Evernote allows the use of tags.  All three of these notes are tagged menu. I also have menus for specific holidays, like Christmas. Cooking on Christmas day requires a different level of organization, so I break down the menu into chunks of time. This way, everything is ready at the same time. I know when in the morning to start each of the recipes.

The Evernote clipper is an excellent tool for organizing recipes and it deserves its own post--coming soon.