I have been MIA for almost a month. Did you miss me? In all honesty, I have been trying to keep up with the pace of my busy family life.

Now that the kids are back in school, and my youngest is in kindergarten, I have begun to tackle all of the projects that have been piling up over the last 12 years.

One such project is recipes. All families seem to fall into the rut of eating the same things week after week. Once of my lofty goals is to try new recipes and offer up healthy and homemade meals (read Martha Stewart here ) But before I can whip up the meals, I need to organize the recipes.

And being the Mac geek that I am, I wanted to have all my recipes on the computer for easy reference. The key, of course, is that I absolutely did not want to type in recipes - too time consuming.

Like many other moms, I have pages dog eared, or post it-ed (is that a word) in a variety of cookbooks, I have a folder of recipes ripped out of magazines, and I have hand written recipes from friends and family. I even have some emailed recipes.

So the hundred dollar question was - how do I organize all of the pieces in a easy use and searchable manner?

My ideal answer was Evernote.

For those of you not familiar with Evernote, it is basically a free program (for both windows and Mac) that you install on your computer. You then create a notebook in which you can store just about any kind of data. Word documents, scanned pictures, pdf’s, url’s, you name it. When you set up your notebook you can elect to have it synced with the servers at Evernote. Doing this provides two benefits. First, you can access your notebook from any computer anywhere, second your notes - ALL of them including pictures (jpg or other formats) and pdf’s, become searchable.

And the searchability is the key to making my Evernote Recipe Book useful.

What I do is scan all my recipe’s into Evernote. I tag them with keywords like main dishes, appetizers, quick breads, soups. Basically the keywords are what you would find as chapter titles in a paper cookbook. I also tag the recipes with either “tried” or “not tried”. So I know which recipes are sure fire hits and which ones will be experiments.

Because of Evernote’s character recognition search function, I do not need to tag the recipes with ingredients.

Now let’s say I scan in a recipe for called Favorite Pasta Salad that contains olives. Let’s say I save the scan as a jpeg or pdf document. Suppose I wanted to make something today that has olives as an ingredient. If I had just stored this recipe in a folder on my computer, then when I searched my folder for the word olives - I would not get a hit. Why? Because my computer cannot search a jpeg or pdf for words that are photographed there.

But Evernote can.

So today I’m feeling like olives. I open my Evernote Recipe Book and search for olives. And yes, Favorite Pasta Salad is flagged as a hit.

If you haven’t used Evernote yet this may be a bit confusing. Take a look at their website and watch the tutorials and you will get a better idea of how Evernote can make your parenting job just a little easier!

And did I mention that there is an app for Evernote for use with iPhone and iPod Touch? For iPhone this is awesome because you can look up your recipes while you are grocery shopping - just in case you left that grocery list sitting on the counter. Of course, if you use iPhone you wouldn’t have a paper grocery list anyway. But that is a discussion for another day!