What the Tech? Easy ways to save recipes

(ABC 6 News) – Thanksgiving and the holiday season bring a lot of people into the kitchen to create meals that have become family traditions. Many people will use cookbooks for recipes and they might also refer to a handwritten recipe that has been handed down to grandchildren and great great-grandchildren.

There’s an easier way to reference those recipes directly from a smartphone or tablet.

My favorite way to save recipes is “Evernote“. Known for its powerful word processing and organizing skills, it works great for recipes too. Evernote has a companion app called “Scannable” which makes saving anything on paper easy.

Using your smartphone camera, Scannable scans, rather than photographs, anything in its camera view. By scanning recipes, you’re able to search by keyword. Here’s how to use it:

Once you’ve captured the scan, add tags that make it easy to find a particular recipe. For example, I have an Evernote notebook for recipes and within that notebook are subfolders for dinner, desserts, holidays, family recipes, and favorites.

Recipes are searchable when you’re buying groceries in the supermarket. I have a recipe for white chili that’s been passed down for years. When I’m at the grocery store I can just search the Evernote app for “chili”, or “beans” and it pulls up that recipe based simply on the fact “chili” or “beans” are in the ingredients.

It’s also great if you have a family recipe handed down on a piece of paper. Evernote saves the recipe just as it looks on paper. Add an Evernote clipper to your web browser and you can save any recipe you find on Pinterest or other websites with a click of the mouse.

Another option is the app Recipe Keeper which allows you to search for recipes on Pinterest and elsewhere. When you find one you want to keep, the steps, photos, and ingredients are saved in the app. You can also snap a photo of any recipe or piece of paper. For cooks who hate math, you can change the number of people you need to serve and Recipe Keeper adjusts the recipe and necessary ingredients automatically.

Recipe Keeper works on iPhones, and Android devices, as well as PCs and Mac computers.

Why go to this trouble? It protects those recipes from being lost forever and if you plan to hand down favorite and family recipes to the next generation of cooks, they’re going to have them on their phones forever.