How do you organize recipes you find online? From low-fat vegan health blogs to southern comfort food, you can find a recipe for anything. Combine the love of cooking with the potential for a career in cooking and you get a plethora of online food blogs.
This makes it easy when you are searching for a new recipe to bring to your favorite holiday party. Looks delicious? Bookmark it!
Except, how do you find it again on your phone when you are in the grocery store trying to buy ingredients?
Let’s say you are on Pinterest and see a recipe that looks great for the summer and want to save it for later. But who are you kidding? Your Pinterest board (Food!) has thousands of pins. Good luck finding that one again!
The question isn’t ‘where do I find recipes?’. The question is, ‘how do I save and manage all the recipes I find?’.
This article will help you organize recipes using Evernote. At the end of this walkthrough you will be able to:
- Easily search and find any recipe you’ve saved
- Edit recipes so they fit your taste or ingredients
- Add your own photos so you know what the recipe really looks like
- Create meal plans from your recipes
Setting up Evernote
Start by setting up two notebooks: Inbox and Recipes.
The first notebook is your Inbox notebook. An Inbox notebook is your dumping ground of notes before being processed. Exactly like a physical or email inbox, actually.
We will use the Inbox notebook as a way to test recipes before adding them to the Recipes notebook. Then you know which recipes you haven’t tried yet.
The second notebook should be your Recipes notebook. This will be where you put all the recipes you’ve tried, liked, and want to use again.
This walkthrough will use Evernote for Desktop, but you can also use Evernote in your browser.
You might also enjoy: How to Organize Evernote Notebooks for Ultimate Productivity
Saving a Recipe
Find a recipe you want to try. If you are using Pinterest, be sure to open the recipe to the webpage where the content lives.
Using your Web Clipper tool, save the recipe to your Inbox notebook.
Select the notebook where you want it to go (Inbox) and select Article. You will see a green outline of the area that will be clipped. By selecting “Article” instead of “Full Screen”, web clipper won’t capture all the banner ads on a site.
Now let’s take a look at what ended up in our Inbox.
Cleaning Up Notes
The content in the main body of the article will be in the note. A link back to the original blog post is at the top so you won’t forget where you found the recipe.
At the time of this writing, this link is only seen on the desktop version, not in the web version of Evernote.
Also included in this note are all the photos, the author’s description, and even some in-line ads.
I recommend deleting extraneous photos and resizing text so the note is easier to read.
Now you have a nice and tidy recipe note you can reference in the future.
Using and Editing Recipes
If this note is for “sometime in the future” it may live in your Inbox for a while. But, if you want to try the recipe soon, set a reminder to use the recipe.
Step One:
Step Two:
Now comes the fun part – making the recipe!
Like most recipes, you may find that you need to make alterations. Because Evernote is the ultimate note-taking tool, it is meant for just this purpose.
You can make notes as you cook, or go back later and make suggestions for the next time you make the recipe.
Types of notes to include:
- Substitutions for ingredients that you use
- Extra steps to help make a recipe clearer Removing instructions you find misleading or unnecessary for your preferences
- Instructions on when to serve or what plates you like to serve it on
- Versions of the recipe (for example, a spicier version for her, or more mild version for him)
- Notes about cooking this recipe in tandem with another recipe (such as a side dish).
- In Evernote, you can create a link to another note!
Organize Recipes
Once you’ve tried a recipe, it is time to make a decision.
Do you see yourself making this recipe again? Was the recipe tasty? Could you edit the recipe to make it better?
If you answered “Yes” to any of the above questions, it is time to move it into your Recipes notebook.
At the top of the note, click on the Inbox notebook. From here, you can move this note to another notebook.
You can repeat the above process to organize recipes from all your favorite blogs. Clip, edit, and save to your Recipes notebook.
Creating Meal Plans
Meal planning is easy with your Recipes notebook. It is like having a cookbook with only your favorite, tested, recipes!
Go to your Recipes notebook and create a Meal Planner note. Don’t reinvent the wheel – Office Otter has a Meal Planner template you can use for free! Download and add it to your Recipes notebook.
Meal Planner
Save your recipes each week with this Evernote template.
You can change up the days of the week in the left column so they start on any day that works for you.
If you plan snacks or eat 4-6 small meals, add columns by clicking on the (+) icon between columns.
When you have the Meal Planner grid set up, save the note as a template so you can create it over and over each week.
Open the Meal Planner note in another tab within Evernote. Then you can switch between your meal plan and your recipes.
To open another tab, click right-click (Mac: 2-finger click) on the meal plan note and select ‘Open Note in New Tab’.
Start adding recipes to your meal planner. Search your Recipes notebook and find a recipe you want to add to the meal plan.
Right click on the recipe note in the note list and select “Copy Note Link” In the Meal Planner note, place your cursor in the cell you want to include the recipe. Right-click and select “Paste” or Ctrl+V (Mac: Command+V). This will paste both the link and the name of the note (recipe name).
In the end, your meal plan should look like this:
Grocery List
Once you have the week planned, add ingredients from each recipe to the Shopping List.
Combine any duplicate ingredients to get your grocery list for the week.
Cross-reference your grocery list with what you have on hand.
And there you have it! An organized recipe book you can use over and over and an easy way to produce a meal plan for the week or month.
Leave a comment below and share how you like to organize recipes.
Featured photo by: Canva.com
