I tend to attack at least a few recipes a week that require step-by-step instructions and a few ingredients I probably don’t have at home. For a weeknight dinner, I might do something as simple as pan searing a piece of fish and roasting a few vegetables on the side. Weeknights, particularly when I’m having friends over for dinner, I’ll put together an actual menu: an appetizer, main, side dish, and dessert. This requires some additional research and planning. I have Evernote installed on my work computer (a Mac), my second home computer (also a Mac), my Android phone and my iPad, so no matter where I am — at work, on the couch, in the kitchen, at the grocery store, or on the train — I have access to my recipes, grocery lists and notes.

Here is how I go about planning out and cooking a delicious meal:

• Ongoing capture of recipes and recipe inspiration.
  I feverishly clip from the web using the Evernote browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome. I clip recipes from my favorite food blogs (like 101cookbooks, The Year in Food, A Sweet Spoonful, Dula Notes, shutterbean, Smitten Kitchen, Joy the Baker, Not Without Salt and Sprouted Kitchen) as well as resource and magazine sites like Epicurious.com, Bon Appetit and Saveur. I like to grab the recipe along with an image or two. If the accompanying post is something I might want to remember, I clip that as well. I’m not super organized about my recipes. I tag them as ‘recipes,’ ‘main,’ ‘dessert’ or my favorite: ‘breakfast.’

See a collection of my favorite breakfast recipes from my food and music site, Turntable Kitchen, in my Shared Notebook. >>> Turntable Kitchen Breakfast Recipes

• Saving photos of handwritten and printed recipes.
  The web is a wealth of information when it comes to recipes, but I love a good old fashioned cookbook or magazine. I’ll often snap a photo of a recipe from a cookbook and save it in Evernote to remind myself to make it later. My mom is a fabulous cook, but she rarely writes down her recipes, so when I get her to write something down — on a piece of scrap paper — I now take a photo of it to search for it later. Evernote can search for text inside of an image so Mom’s Beet Salad doesn’t get lost in my kitchen drawers.

• Narrowing down the recipe search.
  Search is one of Evernote’s most powerful features. Within seconds, I can narrow down hundreds of recipes into a handful. I can compare them visually to figure out which one I want to go with. A search for ‘drinks’ and/or ‘party’ brings up all of the recipes tagged as such. A search for ‘chicken’ finds every recipe with chicken as an ingredient. If I search for ‘Mom,’ I’ll find the recipes my mom has shared with me. From there, I might look in my pantry and decide I really want to use some dried beans I recently purchased. I can search for beans and see all of the recipes containing the word ‘beans.’ Sometimes I’m drawn to a recipe by name, sometimes, by image.

• Choosing the recipe, preparing the grocery list.
  Once I’ve decided on what I’m making, I’ll create a new note titled, “Grocery list.’ I often delete my grocery lists after I’m done with them. If I’m at my desk, I’ll create a checklist, but if I’m on the train, I’ll just jot down the items I remember into my phone. When I’m at the store — even if it’s a last minute pit stop — I always have the grocery list and the full recipe with me.
• The real fun: cooking.
  Back home, I bring my iPad into the kitchen, pull up the recipe in Evernote and start cooking!
• Documenting the experience.
  When I’ve made something, I like to note whether it was tasty, and if I’d make it again. If a recipe is a complete fail, I delete it from my Evernote. But if it could be made better, I make a note of it for the future.

There you have it: planning and cooking a meal with Evernote.

Do you have any tips for organizing recipes, planning and cooking a meal with Evernote? We’d love to hear them in the comments.

The Old Way
For those of us who are organized, doing taxes means keeping a file folder with all of our financial statements, documents, pay stubs and investments somewhere in our house. Then, come tax season, pouring these documents out on our kitchen table (or our accountant’s desk) and manually plugging in numbers into our tax forms.

This process is tedious for those who are organized, but take folks who keep these sorts of documents scattered in all sorts of places – some on paper, some online, some in the closet, some at the office – and a long night(s) is guaranteed.

The Evernote Way

Invest in an affordable scanner for your home (a Fujitsu ScanSnap or one of our other scanner partners). Connect it to your Evernote account. Then, every time you get a pay stub, bank statement, or information about your investments/mortgage documents,  simply scan it to your Evernote account. You can also clip your online statements to your Evernote account. You can drop all of these documents into a notebook labeled ‘Finances’ or even ’2011 Taxes.’ If you want to be even more specific, you can tag each statement with its type (for example: Bank of America, Pay Stub).

When you’re on the go, make a habit of taking photos of receipts (for example: when you’re on a business trip) and tagging these images with a tag like ‘receipts’ to make sure that they’re organized. Check out Trunk partners like Jotnot and Docscanner, which can improve the quality of your photos and make them even more searchable in Evernote.

Come tax time, you can easily find any and all documents that you need in your Evernote account. Once you’ve completed your taxes, save your paperwork in the same folder by scanning it, or simply dropping the PDF into your notebook. You’ll have your previous year’s tax documents in one place for easy reference the following tax season.

Are you doing your taxes with Evernote? Please share your tips and suggestions in the comments.

This post is part of our Makeover Series. Have you used Evernote to makeover an aspect of your life? Please share your story in the comments.