Monthly Archives: September 2013

10 Ways Evernote Improved My Life

There’s an event coming up next week that’s really a pretty big deal.  It’s the Evernote Trunk Conference 2013 and I am super excited to be going.  There will be amazing talks, great tips to learn from all the awesome users who show up to meet and share with others, and of course, the fabulous rockstars behind the software.  I’m also super geeked to see some of the other Evernote Ambassadors, who are the icing on my green elephant-y cake.

I’ve mentioned Evernote a fair bit here before—it is the digital engine that fuels my kitchen organization and…well, the rest of my life.  I’ve talked about 15 ways to get recipes (or anything) into Evernote, how to use it to digitally search your physical cookbooks, and why you should be using the companion app, Evernote Food.  But now, with Evernote Trunk just a few days away, I’m gonna take a cue from the fabulous Jenni Lathrop and Daniel Hendrick, among others, and list 10 ways that Evernote made my life better.

 

10 Ways Evernote Has Improved My Life

1. All of my recipes and cooking notes are in one location, instead of five different websites, three binders, a bunch of loose cards and a stack of a couple dozen old magazines I think I’ll look through again but really won’t.

2. If important mail comes in, I can scan it and toss it.  No more piles of things cluttering up my kitchen counters and table.

3. Shared notebooks make it easier to collaborate with other people, both personally and professionally.  My office uses Evernote Business, so we can easily access shared meeting notes and project information.  My husband and I have a shared notebook with things like scanned bills, info from our dogs’ vets, travel notes, and general household information.

4. With premium, I can toss in files and they’re searchable.  I don’t have to spend a lot of time opening one file after another to figure out if it’s the one I need.

5. Livescribe.  I can take real notes!  On real paper!  With a real pen!  And still have it all saved digitally into Evernote.

6. I use Skitch to take screenshots for documentation and help guides in my regular job, and all of those get saved to Evernote, so I can easily access them over and over again.

7. Evernote Food means I can not only plan where I want to eat when I travel places, but I can take pictures of my dining experiences there and keep track of not just what I ate but where.

8. Re-organizing is really easy.  My productivity style changes on a regular basis; I’m always looking for newer, better ways to organize my life.  If I need to change my system in Evernote, doing so is really, really easy thanks to bulk editing.

9. When I redid my pantry, I took an image note of the space and then marked it up in Skitch.  I kept a list of all the items I wanted to build or buy in Evernote, along with links and prices.  I did the same thing for my garden beds, and I’ll be doing it for every room renovation I eventually do, too.

10. Evernote’s user community is amazingly dedicated and awesome.  Every time I talk to someone, whether a beginner or another Ambassador, I learn great new ideas.  They are the best help guide ever made.

 

And that last reason is what makes me the most excited for the conference–I can’t wait to meet up with people and learn some great new tips and tricks, and share my own.  If you’re coming to this year’s conference, come find me!

 

Check out my Evernote Recipe Notebook

Get Started with Evernote

My Getting Organized with Evernote workshop notebook

Fettuccini with Roasted Red Corn

Roasted Red Corn Linguine, and Some Things I’ve Never Tried

I found red sweet corn at Whole Foods last week.  Not Indian corn.  Not the band Korn painted all up in red.  Red sweet corn.  I’d never even seen it in a store before, let alone tried it.  So I bought some, because what do you do when confronted with something new and mysterious?  You eat it.  It works for babies, it works for puppies, it can work for you, too.

redcornwoil

I’ve also never tried putting corn in pasta before.  I’ve seen it, and I’ve avoided it for a long time.  I shy against putting two carbs together in the same dish, I don’t know why.  It’s like carbs all the way down, and it makes me feel guilty.  But despite that, I decided to make linguine and add the sweet corn in to it.

It was delicious.

redcorn

Of course it was.  I wouldn’t take the time to write up a recipe that was gross or disgusting, not to mention all the photos.  What kind of bored monster do you think I am?

Anyway, other things I’ve never tried:

-Eating an entire plate of Cap’n Crunch french toast from the Bomber (it exists and it is delicious but I fear it would kill me)

-Eating green eggs with a fox.  Eating green eggs in a box.  Eating green eggs here or there, eating green eggs anywhere.

-Strawberries that taste like pineapples.

-Making tiny ice cream sandwiches out of those little cookies they give you on Delta flights.

-Rambutans.

-Making my own puff pastry because I don’t hate my free time that much.

-Chocolate covered grasshoppers.

redcornpasta-mixing

Now, I’m not saying that all of those things would be as delicious as this roasted red corn pasta…except for the french toast.  That would probably do it.  But I’m a little more inclined now to try…everything except the grasshoppers.  Maybe the grasshoppers.  Probably not the grasshoppers.

redcornpasta

Roasted Red Corn Linguine, and Other Things I’ve Never Tried

Ingredients

    For the Corn:
  • 2 ears fresh red sweet corn
  • 1/2-3/4 cup olive oil
  • 1 cup fresh basil
  • 3 whole peeled garlic cloves
  • 1/4 tsp black pepper
  • 1/2 tsp sea salt
  • For the Chicken
  • 1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • 1 cup cherry tomatoes
  • 1/4 tsp black pepper
  • 1/2 tsp sea salt
  • For everything else
  • 1 pound fresh linguine noodles, cooked according to package directions
  • 1/2 cup fresh basil, chopped
  • 1 cup sliced red onion
  • 2 cups green beans, cut in half
  • 1 tbsp butter
  • pecorino romano, grated--however much you want

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 400F. Line two small baking pans with tin foil.
  2. Prepare the corn: place the oil, basil, garlic, pepper and salt in a blender and puree. Brush a few tablespoons of the oil mixture all over the sweet corn. Place the corn in one of the prepared pans.
  3. Prepare the chicken: in the other tinfoiled pan, place the boneless, skinless chicken breasts and the cherry tomatoes. Drizzle the olive oil over both and sprinkle them with the salt and pepper.
  4. Place both pans in the oven and roast for 30 minutes, or until the corn is browned and soft and the chicken is cooked through. Let cool slightly. Slice the chicken into strips. Hold each corn cob up on its end and carefully cut the corn kernels off the cobs.
  5. In a large bowl, toss the cooked linguine noodles, fresh basil, red onion, green beans, butter, chicken and corn kernels with the rest of the oil/garlic/basil mixture (from step 2). Sprinkle the pasta with the grated pecorino.
  6. Enjoy!
http://haveforkwilleat.com/2013/09/roasted-red-corn-linguine-and-some-things-ive-never-tried/

Supercook__recipe_search_by_ingredients_you_have_at_home

Optimize Your Pantry: Using Supercook to Create a Menu

Supercook is an awesome little site.  If you’ve never tried it, what it does is help you find recipes using ingredients you specifically have on hand.  It’s great for a “Cook Your Cupboard” type thing, if you have ingredients sitting around that you’re not familiar with and don’t know how to use, or if you’re just looking for something new to try.  It can also help you save money by creating menus around sale items at your local grocery store.

Take your current grocery store sales circular.  For instance, I like to shop at Hiller’s, which is a local, southeast Michigan grocery chain.  I go through the circular and find main staple items that are on sale.  This week, I can see they have steak, greek yogurt, strawberries, chicken breast, portobello mushrooms, radishes, salmon, tortillas, cheese, sour cream, eggs, canned tuna and watermelon on sale.   I like most of those things; I almost never cook with radishes, though, so that kind of appeals to me as something new to try.  My goal here is to focus on these items, since they’re on sale, supplement them with a few things I always keep on hand (like rice and herbs/spices), and develop a dinner menu for the week that will give us healthy meals but also allow me to experiment a bit.Supercook__recipe_search_by_ingredients_you_have_at_home_and_Evernote So here I’d open Evernote and create a note with the list of items that are on sale and how much they cost.  If you prefer pen and paper, break out your trusty Livescribe pen or Evernote Moleskin notebook…or a sticky note or the back of a napkin, whatever works.

Now, go to supercook.com.  There’s an area called “My Kitchen” on the front page which lets you plug in specific ingredients, or you can choose them from a tag cloud in the center of the page.

I put in all the sale item ingredients and as I do that, it starts offering recipe suggestions that use at least one of those ingredients (and it tells you at a glance what other main ingredients you’ll need).  I can narrow down the results by category–for instance, dinner, salad, dessert, veggie, etc.  I can specify if I have a particular diet (i.e., gluten free, no dairy, etc).  I can also emphasize that I really want to use certain ingredients.

Supercook__recipe_search_by_ingredients_you_have_at_home-2 3

In this case, I put in the foods mentioned above and sorted through the results.   I made a weekday menu consisting of the following meals:

  • Yogurt marinated grilled chicken with braised radishes
  • Brazilian style skirtsteak with watermelon-lime salad
  • Bloody Mary salmon with salt-baked potatoes
  • Yogurt chicken curry with rice
  • Salmon salad wraps with marinated portobello

So once I’ve got some dish options that I think will work, I list the week’s dinner menu in that same Evernote note where my initial grocery list was.  So now I have a grocery list of sale items, plus the dish I’m going to make with it and the day I’m going to make it.  And I can also do this for breakfast, lunch and dessert.

Supercook__recipe_search_by_ingredients_you_have_at_home-2

Supercook__recipe_search_by_ingredients_you_have_at_home_and_Camera_Uploads-2

Of course, the service isn’t perfect.  The interface isn’t the most gorgeous thing ever, it won’t have every single ingredient you can think to put in, and not every suggestion has pictures or is going to be something you really want to eat.  But it’s a great start for figuring out a menu cheaply and trying some new things.

Anyway, give it a shot–it might just help you organize your shopping, utilize your pantry more effectively and still experiment with delicious new dishes.

Supercook