Grandma's cookie recipe gets high tech
The Recipe Manager software helps you save space and paper by letting you digitize your favorite recipes
I've been cooking long enough to build up a substantial archive of tried-and-true recipes, but for some reason, I've never found a way to organize them. I'll find one that works and file it away with every intention of using it again, but I'll either forget that it's there or I'll get frustrated rifling through the piles of magazine clippings.
At some point I attempted to solve the problem by starting a recipe book. I soon learned, however, that the dedication required to keep a recipe book is just about as much as the dedication to learn how to cook in the first place. Plus, when it was all said and done, I wasn't any more organized than I had been when I started out. I still had the same system as my folder full of magazine clippings, only my book was harder to read and didn't have any pretty pictures. Since then, I've had trouble keeping track of the good recipes that I've tried, and in most cases, have just thrown them out with the intention of looking them up as needed.
So if writing recipes down doesn't work, and neither does saving clippings, the next logical step is to follow the trend in areas like communication, shopping, and bill-paying: computerize them!
There are other recipe managers available, but the Recipe Manager seems to take the cake (no pun intended). Winner of Best in Show at Macworld, the software provides a simple way to archive a huge collection of recipes, including ones that you make yourself and those you find elsewhere.
You can create your own cookbooks from your recipe collection and e-mail them to friends and family, as well as track your weight, food intake, and blood pressure. If you don't want to rely on old family stand-bys, you can import recipes.
The Recipe Manager also gives you the planning power to schedule meals well in advance, using a built-in calendar. You can also automatically populate shopping lists that can be exported to your iPod.
If you're the kind of person who prefers the handwritten variety of cookbook, then I celebrate your commitment to writing your favorites down. For those who can't seem to find the time, I'm thankful that there's a program that lets us digitize recipes.