This Friday, we’d like to show you how you can use Skitch to create a quick note to send the mother, grandmother, wife, or girlfriend in your life to let her know you’re thinking of her — and not just on Mother’s Day. After all, she should be celebrated every day!

The hardest part of creating the card is picking a photo. Once you’ve taken one with Skitch or you’ve opened another photo you like in Skitch, just use the pen tool or text to write your message for Mom. Skitch’s tools are so simple, you can easily get the kids involved in signing the card, too!

After you’ve added your personal touch to the image, sharing it is a cinch. Just tap the share button in the corner to share a link with her, post it to Facebook or Twitter, or send it in an email. In just a few short minutes, you can create an adorable card that communicates just how much Mom means to you.

If you’re looking for even more ideas to make this Mother’s Day special, check out our tips for planning the Perfect Mother’s Day brunch. How are you using Evernote and Skitch to plan Mother’s Day this year?

Learn more about how to create a restaurant wish list in Evernote Food

Don’t have Evernote Food 2.1? Download it for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch now »

Here’s a quick rundown of how this feature works.

1. Open the Restaurants section in Evernote Food on your iPhone or iPad. Search for restaurants in a chosen destination and choose the one you want to try. From here, you can either add the restaurant to your Saved list or book a table right away.

2. Once you’ve selected a restaurant, you can review all the essential information you need prior to booking a table, including Foursquare venue ratings and even the menu. If you like what you see, tap ‘Make a reservation.’

3. From here, you’ll recognize the familiar OpenTable booking flow. Just select the date, time, and number of people you want a table for and confirm your reservation.

(Bonus tip: When you visit a restaurant, create a My Meals note to capture the highlights of the experience with photos and captions. To see all the spots you’ve visited, tap the My Meals tab in Restaurants. The restaurants you’ve visited that are associated with your My Meals notes will show up here.

Want to learn more about Evernote Food? Check out the following blog posts:

Sync Your Recipes to Evernote Food
Build a Restaurant Wish List
Build Your Own Cookbook
Chronicle Your Culinary Adventures

For more information on using Evernote Food, check out our Evernote Food user guide and also stop by our Evernote Food Facebook page for regular tips.

Photo credit: Tacolicious

Beverage Director Mike Barrow also took the time to answer our Q&A about what elevates a margarita from good to great. (Bonus tip for Evernote Food users: search within the app’s Explore Recipes section to discover a myriad of margarita recipes.).

Get the recipes and read the Q&A

Don’t have Evernote Food 2.1? Download it for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch now »

Follow Along on the Blog & Connect with Us

Want more great spring tips from Evernote? Follow along with Spring Made Simple by searching for the tag Spring Made Simple on the blog, and all the great spring content we’ve got in store this season will populate. Each week we’ll be adding a number of special tips to kick your spring cleaning into high gear from our Ambassadors, delicious and easy Evernote Food recipes from notable chefs and restaurateurs, and tons more! You won’t want to miss out.

Do you have any great spring tips, ideas and recipes to share? Post your favorite spring cleaning tips, connect with others tackling new projects or just join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook. Follow @evernotelife and use the hashtag #evernotelife on Twitter throughout the spring season, and Like us on Facebook.

Many seasoned Evernote users have been saving recipes to their Evernote accounts for a while. If you’re like us and you’re more than a little obsessed with collecting recipes, then your food-related notebooks may include recipes in various formats, from JPEGs to web clips to scanned and hand-typed ones.

With Evernote Food 2.1, you can now import designated notebooks with all of these recipes into My Cookbook in Evernote Food. You can also do this with tags if that’s how you organize the notes.

Don’t have Evernote Food 2.1? Download it for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch now ».

Let’s review how this feature works.

1. First, launch the app and tap the elephant icon at the top left corner of the screen.

2. Scroll down to Recipe Settings. Tap ‘Include Recipes from Account.’

3. To select Notebooks, tap ‘Include notebooks.’ To select tags, tap ‘Include tags.’

4. On the Notebooks screen, choose the Evernote Notebooks that contain the recipes you want to see in Evernote Food. You can select as many as you want. Don’t worry, you can change your selections whenever you like.

Bonus Tip: make sure to edit your recipe notebooks in Evernote before getting to this step, so only the recipes you want to import show up in Evernote Food. If recipes show up in the app that you don’t want there, you can hide them by tapping the edit tool at the bottom of the recipe screen and then tapping ‘Hide.’

The steps are exactly the same to select tags assigned to recipes you want to see in Evernote Food.

5. Once you’ve made all of your Notebook and tag selections, exit from Settings and open the My Cookbook section in the app. Et voila! You’ll now see all of your recipes in one place within Evernote Food. Give this feature a spin and let us know how it works for you.

Want to learn more about how to use Evernote Food? Check out the following blog posts:

Build a Restaurant Wish List
Build Your Own Cookbook
Chronicle Your Culinary Adventures

For more information on using Evernote Food, check out our Evernote Food user guide and also stop by our Evernote Food Facebook page for regular tips.

Here are 3 tips to make it a day that special person in your life won’t soon forget.

Pick a Spectacular Restaurant

Before you make the reservations, do some research and collect it all in Evernote.

Ask for recommendations from friends, consult review sites, and check out menus, then save your favorites to your Evernote account with the Evernote Web Clipper. You can also use Evernote Food to discover new restaurants. The built in location-based restaurant and cuisine search makes it easy to select a restaurant close to you or find one that serves they type of food you’re looking for. Once you make those reservations, email your confirmation into your Evernote account, so that it’s accessible on your mobile device in case you need to pull it up once you arrive at the restaurant.

Plan a Getaway

If your plans involve a romantic weekend trip or a getaway to a special location, use Evernote to keep all the details straight. Research hotels ahead of time and clip them with Evernote so that when it comes time to book you’ll know exactly where to choose. Save Web Clips of maps, guides or any other important information you might need, then annotate them right in Skitch to easily remember detailed information you’ll need once you arrive at your destination.

Pro tip: Make a to-do list of things to pack. You can check things off as you go to be sure all the details are accounted for and a forgotten corkscrew or umbrella doesn’t derail your day.

Find the Perfect Gift

Hopefully you’ve been paying attention and taking note of the hints your significant other has been dropping throughout the year and saving them in Evernote. If not, it’s still not too late to look online for gift ideas from their favorite stores or websites. Another great trick is to keep your eye out for gift guides from your favorite retailers and blogs; these can be useful when you need some inspiration or guidance.

Pro tip: If you’re out shopping with your significant other and come across something, snap a photo in Evernote so you can go back and get it later. Add it to a specific “gift” notebook or use a tag so you can search for it later. You can even use Evernote to search for text in the image, so finding it is never hard.

Cook a Special Meal

Show them how much you care by creating a special meal at home. Even if you’re not an expert chef, you can use Evernote Food to make it look like you are. Browse through recipes right inside Evernote Food or clip them from websites, then make a shopping list of ingredients in Evernote and check them off on your phone. When it comes time to actually cook the meal, pull up the recipe on your phone or tablet and follow the directions.

Looking for more ways to use Evernote this Valentine’s Day? Check out our 8 Great Ways Couples Can Use Evernote Shared Notebooks.

Once you scan a business card, Evernote Hello automatically detects key information on the card, including phone and fax numbers, email address, name and more, and adds it all to the new Hello Contact, making it faster and easier than ever to remember everything about the people you meet than ever before. If you have connected your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, Evernote Hello will also look the person up by their email address and import even more information from their online profiles.

The following tips will help you get the best results out of this feature:

1. Place a light business card on a dark surface. Place a dark business card on a light surface. A contrasting background helps Evernote recognize the edges of the business card and improves text recognition.
2. Tilt the phone slightly so the flash bounces away from the card. The card should look a little tilted in your display, but Evernote will automatically correct for this.
3. Business cards with complicated designs are difficult to recognize properly. If you are not successful capturing a certain card, move on and enter details manually.

Have you tried the new business card scanning feature in Evernote Hello for iPhone and iPod Touch? Let us know what you think in the comments.

One of our favorite ways to use Evernote Food is for capturing food moments from our culinary travels, whether near or far from home. Using Food’s My Meals feature as a travel journal of sorts is a great way to preserve and share the small but memorable details that make your food adventures special.

Don’t have Evernote Food 2.0? Download it for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch now.

The following is a quick overview of how to use Evernote Food to create a photo essay from your dining out experiences.

1. To create a new meal using the My Meals feature, tap the plus sign on the home screen or within the My Meals section of the app.



2. Next, capture all of the details about the meal you want to remember: title, location, cuisine type, tags, and a summary description of the experience. Write your accompanying captions to personalize the note and bring the experience to life for family and friends.



3. One of the great things about Evernote Food is how much control you have over when and how you create new meal notes. You can capture your photos using  the app’s built-in camera or pull them from your camera roll – or both. You can create a meal in the moment or after the fact. The app also lets you set your location during your meal, or after you return home. Additionally, you can create new meals when you are offline – you just need a network connection to sync and share.



4. Once your meal looks and reads the way you want it to, you have multiple ways to share it: Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, or via a link.



5. Customize your message before you share your meal note on Facebook or Twitter.



6. Meal notes you create using My Meals automatically show up in the Restaurants section of the app.



7. Bonus: All of the culinary adventures you chronicle from your travels automatically sync to your Evernote account.

For more information on using Evernote Food, check out our Evernote Food user guide and also stop by our Evernote Food Facebook page for regular tips.

Don’t have Evernote Food 2.0? Download it for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch now.

Discover, Collect, Cook

Here’s how you can create your own personalized cookbook in Evernote Food in three easy steps.

1. First, use Evernote Food’s Explore Recipes section to search thousands of recipes from the top food bloggers and websites by ingredient, dish, or occasion. Today, we’re opting for these veggie tacos from Naturally Ella.

2. We built Evernote’s Web Clipper into Evernote Food. Once you find a recipe you like, tap the scissors icon to clip it into My Cookbook, where your collection of recipes is stored within the app.

3. This is where the clipping function gets even cooler. As part of the clipping process in Evernote Food, you can choose to save your Web Clip to any notebook in your Evernote account.

Any recipes you clip or manually save in your Evernote account will automatically be pulled into My Cookbook by Evernote Food. You can also add tags for enhanced search.

 
Here’s a view of My Cookbook with all of your recipes in one place for maximum convenience. This works particularly well when you’re cooking with an iPad.

For more information on using Evernote Food, check out our Evernote Food user guide and also stop by our Evernote Food Facebook page for regular tips.

Don’t have Evernote Food 2.0? Download it for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch now.

Search and save restaurants, wherever you are

Let’s say you’re craving crab, and you’ve heard of a great restaurant in San Francisco that serves it. To search for and save the restaurant to your list in Evernote Food, simply do the following:

1. Search for the restaurant, making sure to specify the city where it is located if it’s other than your current location.

2. On an iPhone, once the restaurant appears in search, you can toggle between list and map view using the icons at the top right of your device (on the iPad, list and map view display side-by-side).

3. Once you have the restaurant you want to add to your list, tap on it and save it using the scissors icon at the top right of the screen.

4. Tap on the ‘Saved’ tab and the restaurant will be there in your list. Bonus: any restaurant you clip in Evernote Food is automatically saved to your Evernote account.

For more information on using Evernote Food, check out our Evernote Food user guide and also stop by our Evernote Food Facebook page for regular tips.

• Write down your resolutions. Whether you prefer to make a checklist, write your goals down in your Smart Notebook (and snap a picture, saving your list to your Evernote account), or create a few separate notes with your resolutions, capture them while they’re fresh in your mind.
• Savor the moments. One of the great things about Evernote’s apps is their ability to let you capture the things that matter to you in the moment, without thinking too much about when you might need them again. Use Evernote to save your next great business idea, Evernote Food to remember the food and meals you love (and people you share them with), Evernote Hello to remember people you meet, the Web Clipper and Clearly to save things you come across on the Internet that you may want to revisit.
• Give back. Have a goal of giving back to your community in 2013? Snap photos of items you want to donate, create a notebook for organizing a community project, or make a budget for charitable donations.
• Look back. Spend an afternoon looking back at the past year by browsing through your Evernote account. See what articles you wanted to read, review successful work projects (and ones you’d like to tackle in 2013), and recall great meals you had. Note things you wanted to accomplish but didn’t (like taking a vacation to Thailand or crocheting a scarf). Think about whether you’d like to do these things in the New Year and add them to your resolutions!
• Set deadlines. We all make resolutions that we never keep. This year, resolve to accomplish the things you set out to do. Create calendar reminders for yourself, using Note Links to associate specific goals/tasks with dates.

Happy New Year to you and yours from our team! We’ll see you next week with fresh content, tips, and more.

Take the Evernote Holiday Pledge

From now through the New Year, you can sign up for the Evernote Holiday Pledge and opt in to receive email tips and guidance from the Evernote team and our Ambassadors about ways you can get more out of Evernote. Participate in virtual events like the Evernote  & Chronicle Books Craft-Along and join our public notebook, which is updated regularly with fresh tips and guides. Stay tuned for new tips and challenges to help you start the new year right.