Website Love: Wishpot

First, I want to disclose this is a non-paid endorsement of a website I spent some time on this past weekend that I now LOVE!

For those of you who follow and chat with me on Twitter, you may know that I never, ever step into a store during the holiday season. I always do my shopping online. Do I have to pay shipping? Of course! But to me it's a small premium to pay to not have to endure the madness of holiday season shopping in NYC.

So over the years I've come up with several systems where I create lists of gifts ideas for my friends and family, and then go about finding them on the Internet. Usually I'd have to keep some sort of a computer based document where I could then copy and paste the links of everything I've found into. While this system was all well and good, it was a bit too manual for my tastes.

So a friend of mine over the past week or so had set up an Amazon Wishlist account to create a donation item list to send school supplies to the Nuevos Caminos Special Needs School in Ecuador, where she's volunteered before. When I looked at her site to donate myself, it reminded me of several tweets I've seen from @wishpot on Twitter about their service, www.wishpot.com, which is very similar. So I decided to check it out and am glad i did.

Basically Wishpot allows you to set up an account, and then to make "wishlists" using items you find anywhere on the Internet. This would work great for brides who don't want to register at traditional department stores. They even have a browser tool button you can install that let's you add an item to your account from an external website by the click of a button.

The feature I was most surprised by is they also have a section where you can store gift ideas you find for your friends and family and you can keep the list private. Score! I now had my easy, more instant solution for my online holiday shopping!

While on the site, I also made sure to make my own "wishlist" of items I'd like that I would never buy for myself. This way I can forward it to my husband, friends and family to give them a few ideas of stuff I'd appreciate this holiday season. Of course I wouldn't send it to anyone unless they asked me if there was anything in particular I'd like (though this is common in my family so at least I'm prepared).

Do you have a special technique you use to make your holiday shopping experience less stressful? Do share!

Tips to Organize Online Recipes

I created a system recently that works really well for me for organizing and planning meals. I've been so excited about it, I just had to share it!

Like many folks, instead of clipping recipes out of magazines or looking them up in cookbooks, I've recently instead utilized the Internet to find new ones to try out. Though I loved the limitless number of recipes you can find on the Internet, I found it difficult to organize the tons of printouts I would make of these recipes. I'd always have to go back to searching the Internet to find a recipe I like who's print out I had misplaced.

Enter Evernote. Evernote is a fantastic, free online service that allows you to easily "clip" and store items of interest you find anywhere. So you can take a cell phone photo of something you like and upload it to Evernote. You could also upload voice notes (via your phone) or highlight items of interest from the Internet and using a bookmark tool have them uploaded to your Evernote account.

When viewing your "notes" in Evernote, you can then search, tag and organize them. This has worked great for me because I can now easily tag my recipes. Some tags I might use include:

• QUICK (I like meals that take 30 minutes or less to prepare)
• MEAL TYPE (ENTREE, LUNCH, etc.)
• PREPARATION TYPE (ONE POT, STIR-FRY, etc.)
• PRIMARY INGREDIENTS
• and whatever else makes sense to use as a tag.

Using this tag system makes planning meals a breeze now. I've been making a conscious effort shop more from my pantry in efforts to cut down my grocery bills and use up everything I stock up on at Costco (yes, we do have Costco's in NYC). So if I see in my pantry I have a ton of pasta and some garbanzo beans, i can now do a search in Evernote for those tags to find recipes I've stored that I've wanted to try that use those ingredients. Then I only have to buy a few small items to complete the recipe.

Evernote also has smart phone applications. I've recently been using the iPhone application. This makes it really easy to access the recipe without having to either print it out or lug my laptop into the kitchen. Also, let's say my husband gets home from work before me and wants to start dinner for us (isn't my husband a sweetie?!), I can easily email him the recipe from the Evernote iPhone app so he can get a head start on it.

My hubby and I are huge foodies and like to cook and find new recipes ourselves, and this system has been working really well for us. How do you plan your meals?