http://www.ClutterDiet.com Get organized with home organizing tips from professional organizers at The Clutter Diet. Unless you are making a pot of stone soup, you are going to need your recipes handy. But how do you collect & organize your recipes? Scraps of paper can be easy to lose and hard to search through to find just the right thing. In today’s video Lorie Marrero is showing you the tools & steps she uses to organize her own recipes. Organizing recipes in a recipe binder is a recipe for success! These Clutter Video Tips are posted frequently here on our clutterdiet channel. Search Twitter for #ClutterVideoTip also to find comments on our organizing tips. Lorie Marrero is the creator of ClutterDiet.com and the author of The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home & Taking Control of Your Life. Lorie also serves as the national spokesperson for Goodwill Industries International & ambassador of the Donate Movement.
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Hi I’m Lorie Marrero creator of the Clutter Diet book & online program, today we’re going to talk about organizing recipes. Here’s the problem, people are overwhelmed with paper recipe clutter. They’ve clipped recipes from magazines, gotten index cards & scraps of paper with recipes from friends, & scribbled something down off the television. What do you do with all that stuff? One solution is to use a recipe binder. I have one right here. I still use it, it’s great. I have a whole video about how to make one of these. That works pretty well, but I think there is a better solution, & I am migrating toward that. I have most of my frequently used recipes in there, & that is the application called “Evernote.”
Evernote is free I have no financial connection to it, I just like it a whole lot. & what happens is everything with your Evernote database is located in every place you need it to be- on your Smart Phone, tablet, desktop or laptop, & on the web which you can access from any computer. All of that synchronizes constantly with each other so your information is updated everywhere you go.
Say that you’ve ripped out something from a magazine. Before, what I would tell you to do is put that in the front pocket of your binder until you have tried this recipe. When you try it & you like it, move it into the binder so that you can know that it’s a keeper & you’re filing it away to use it again. If it isn’t good throw it away. Instead of doing that we are going to get rid of the paper clutter by taking a picture with my Ipad camera. Or I can use my Smart Phone camera. You can scan it if you want to. Then pull that right into a note inside Evernote. Then you’re going to do a couple of things. Title that & then tag it. Here’s where the real genius comes in. If you use a recipe binder you have to choose one category of these dividers. Let’s say it’s a main dish. But what if you think of this recipe in different ways? What if you don’t want to just put one category? You can tag multiple tags in Evernote & search those & sort those in different ways. It could be a main dish, Thai food, dinners, or lunches. It could also be other categories for other recipes. Breads, breakfasts, all kinds of things that are the way you think about your food. There’s one tag that I want to share with you that’s a great little trick “keepers.” I just tag it “keepers” whenever I have tried the recipe & I like it & I’m keeping it, that way I know that I’ve tried it & I like it. & if I try a recipe & I don’t like it, I just delete it. The “keepers” tag helps me know that it’s a good one.
The beauty of doing this, it’s searchable. You’re thinking, “Yes, the title of the recipe & the tags & all that are searchable,” & they are, but here is the most amazing part. When you take a photo & move that picture into an Evernote note, all of the text inside the photograph is actually searchable. I want to make sure you understand how cool that is. Search for an ingredient or some key word that you remember about the recipe, & you can still find it. That is amazing. Also, it’s portable. Your information is everywhere. I’ve been in the grocery store many times thinking, “Oh, no, was it 2 tomatoes I needed for that dish, or just 1?” & I can go right to my recipe in the store & reference that. Another big benefit is that you have no paper clutter.
Think about moving gradually over to Evernote. That’s how I’m doing it. I still have my binder & I am moving recipes as it makes sense for me. Let us know how that goes for you. You can share what you think in the comments & let us know what you think about our whole YouTube channel. We hope that you’ll subscribe. We have a lot of play lists organized for you to learn about all different themes of content that we have. Please let us know what you think we’d love to hear from you.
See you next time, & may you always be happy & grateful for having more than enough.
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