Evernote to My Rescue

It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that I can be a bit behind the times. It takes a while for trends to grow on me. (I'm still not sure how I feel about wedge heels.) I'll find something and get so excited about it...only to be reminded by my husband that it's been around for a while and it's no longer exciting to anyone but me (although he still thinks it's cute when I get excited over these sorts of things). Evernote would be a perfect example of this.

The week before Thanksgiving I lost my iPhone at a club in Las Vegas. At the time this was annoying, but not much more. A true cell phone geek, Jake was more concerned about the data I'd lost in the weeks since I'd backed up (it's not my fault that my computer doesn't like iTunes) than the phone itself or the cost to replace it. As the weeks have gone on, though, I'm just realizing what I've lost in my irretrievable data. Notes detailing when I last got my hair cut or had my tires rotated, and of course, my recipes.
While I have known of Evernote's existence for quite some time, I didn't really know what it did. To me it was a vague idea of a bunch of things just thrown together in a jumble, something that doesn't really appeal to my obsessively organized personality. All of that changed when I discovered that it's not as chaotic as I'd imagined and it could be a recipe storage solution that wouldn't get lost if my phone did again. And I'm discovering that it's so much more than that.

I can use it to quickly look up recipe ingredients while at the grocery store or as a reference when cooking in the kitchen. No more stained recipe sheets I can't read because part of the print is covered by a marinara spill. I won't even go into how much I love that I can attach pictures to the recipes. When someone asks me for a particular recipe that doesn't exist on the internet (as far as I know), I don't have to stop, think about it, pull up a new email and type out a list of ingredients and directions from memory; I can just open my Evernote app, select the Semi-Fresh Salsa recipe and email it. Done.