My Husband is Brilliant

One reason I married Rob: He’s brilliant.

He opened my eyes to a piece of software of which I have been completely unaware up til now. It’s called OneNote and it’s a Microsoft Office product. He said he saw it years back but has only recently made use of it. Myself, I don’t venture outside of Word (and the occasional foray into Excel, but only when I really really have to). So this discovery has been a revelation. Still, what to do with it?

This is where his brilliance comes in, and why this post pertains to cooking. He pointed out that it would be much easier to keep track of my recipes in this program. He compared it to a giant virtual Trapper Keeper (aww, remember them?) in which notes, files, even screen shots can all be kept. For instance, if I already have a recipe I often refer back to online (there are many, many of these), rather than going to the webpage every time I want to make a certain dish, I can just make a screen shot and put it right there in my tabbed file. So all I’d have to do would be to click on the file and bingo, recipe. Right next to the recipe I can make notes of my own, of which again there are many but in this case they’re all up in my head. This will be much more convenient and involve way less head scratching. Head scratching when your hands are full of bread dough isn’t a good idea anyway. Not like I’d know that from experience or anything…

Another idea he came up with was to make spreadsheets of my recipes, with ingredients and amounts, and to modify as I go along. So one row may be the original recipe, the next can be what I’ve modified so far, and so on and so forth until I arrive at what works best for me. And the beauty part is that this, too, can be stored right in my file for that recipe in OneNote. Amazing! Even though it does involve Excel. But I’ll adapt. I guess.

And this doesn’t have to be just for cooking. I can have a notebook for writing ideas, one for craft ideas (complete with inspiration pics!), I can even make a virtual vision board. How cool!

Oh, and it stores audio and video files as well. Good way to make use of my handy built-in webcam, no?

Viva technology!