Paperless workflow is an amazing upgrade to a classroom, and I must have talked about this at home enough because my wife asked me what we could do with her recipe collection. My wife is an amazing chef and she has collected handwritten recipes, as well as recipes collected from magazines. She has collected these for years.
Using the ScanSnap ix500 we began scanning in her giant stack of recipes into Evernote. Evernote was a great choice because the scanner will auto deliver the files into Evernote and both my wife and I can access Evernote from our phones, Ipads, or desktop computer. Evernote also has an app called "Evernote Food." As we scanned in the recipes we also setup Evernote food to draw the recipes out of our Evernote account. Once we began scanning my wife took over. She placed 20 or so recipes in the feed, pressed the scan button, and began labeling the files as they showed up in Evernote.
As she uploaded the recipes we did pause and upgrade our Evernote account to premium, this allowed us to upload 1gb of files per month. This worked out to over 400 recipes scanned in over the course of 2 days. Once we hit the quota we stopped, willing to wait for the first of the month to upload the next 400 recipes.
Why bother?
Once the recipes are in Evernote they are part of an active searchable database. Now when I have left over cooked quinoa, I can search my Evernote for "cooked quinoa" and find all of the recipes that call for it as an ingredient. Or more importantly I can find the pumpkin waffles recipe without dumping all those loose pieces of paper on the counter.
The Reviews:
My wife thinks this is the greatest thing to happen in her kitchen since the Kitchen Aid mixer. She loves that all her favorites are tagged and searchable. She gives the Scan Snap ix500 high marks on ease of use and workflow automation. She says that until this tool came along she cannot imagine how she would have organized these recipes.
Comments