onenote recipe bookOne of the oldest recipes ever to be discovered is a 4000-year-old beer formula recorded on a clay tablet. Those brew masters would envy the ways we catalog recipes today:  a scrawled family recipe on an index card, bookmarked recipes from Allrecipe.com, or the batter-splattered page of your mom's cookbook.

All those recipe formats have a clear downside. How the heck do you organize them so you can find one when it's time to cook?

It's really easy. You put all of them (except for the 4000-year-old clay tablet) in OneNote. It lets you drop in screen clippings, scanned images of handwritten recipes, and even recorded reminders to go slow on the hot pepper sauce.

To help you get started, we created this OneNote cookbook. Download it for free and make it your own by following these simple tips.

Clipping recipes from webpages 

When you find a recipe on one of the countless recipe websites, you can drop it into OneNote in three clicks.

  1. Go to your favorite foodie site and pick out a recipe
  2. With that webpage open, go to the Insert tab in OneNote, and click Screen Clipping
  3. Select any portion of the online recipe, and voila! The recipe drops into OneNote-along with the URL for easy reference


 

Add audio notes

Do you ever follow a recipe to the letter? It's easy to record your audio notes to add a dash more of this or a sprinkle more of that, and play it back later.

  1. Go to the Insert tab, and click Record Audio
  2. Start speaking or recording, and when you click Stop, it adds the recording to the page


 

Reverse recipe lookup

Got a lot of food in your refrigerator that you don't want to go bad? Save a trip to the grocery store by searching your recipes for what you have on hand.

  1. Go to the Search box located in the top-right corner of your notebook
  2. Type an ingredient and choose what you want to cook



Recipe preservation

Handwritten recipes passed down from over generations have sentimental value. For safekeeping, scan them into OneNote and put the originals away.

  1. Connect a scanner to your computer and put the recipe facedown on the glass
  2. Go to the  Insert tab, and click Scanner Printout
  3. In the dialogue box, click Custom Insert, and then click Start

    The scanner starts and when it's finished, plunks the recipe into your OneNote cookbook.. 


 

Sharing your cookbook

After you've put together a cookbook to rival Wolfgang Puck, you can share it with your own friends and followers by using OneNote with SkyDrive.

Watch this video to learn how.

Going to the BlogHer Food Conference?

The Office team is heading to the BlogHer Food conference this weekend in Seattle to showcase how

Office 2010 makes the perfect kitchen companion. We'll be demonstrating these five OneNote tips above and more. If you're going, be sure to stop by booth 17 and say hello.

--Jevon Fark

Office Team