I love finding new uses for Home Document Manager, and I’m always intrigued to find out what our users are, well, using it for. A few weeks ago, I caught one of my guinea pig users (a friend) using it to organize her cooking recipes. She’s forever cutting out recipes from magazines and had previously stored them in a tin box. An aesthetically pleasing tin box, but a tin box nonetheless.

Despite my protests that it was never intended for use with recipes, she persisted, and it actually worked pretty well. She was able to organize them into folders and subfolders, and she could search through the documents to find similar recipes. For example, searching for ‘risotto’, returns a list of recipes for risotto dishes. Even more interesting, if she had, say some chicken, leek and peppers that needed using up, she can search for “chicken leek pepper” and find all recipes that would uses these ingredients.

She has a small, oldish laptop that she can put on a kitchen worktop when she wants, but be careful if you’re putting your brand new $2000 tablet  on the same surface as food/oil/water/fire.