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Yum

Recipe cookbook manager with sample recipes.

Version:  3.2.0

   [ Views: 496 ]

Pretty good but...

Feedback Type:  Review

Contributed by: Vexis58 Friday, January 21 2005 @ 02:00 PM PST

Product Platform: MacOSX

Used Product For: 1-6 months

This program is really quite nice to use. I love how you can put recipes in multiple sections if you can't decide where to put them. Does my mom's roast chicken go under main dishes or poultry? Why not both? However, I have a few complaints.

1. The sample recipes that it comes with are mostly unusable by me (I'm assuming the author is from Australia, due to the wallaby recipes I'm encountering?) since almost all of the ingredients are measured in grams and liters, and the temperatures that are given (though most say something like "bake in a moderate oven" what IS a "moderate" oven, exactly? 350? 325? 375?) are all in Celsius. I could possibly use them, but I dislike having to convert every single thing in the recipes to units I can understand. If you had a way to convert measurements in the program, that would make some of these a little better. I am a firm believer in the metric system, but I just can't get myself to use it when cooking. Also, a lot of the dessert recipes use a kind of sugar we can't really get here in the US.

2. When I went to try to get my recipes out so that I could turn them into text files for my iPod, I discovered that the "export to text" feature doesn't really work in a way that saves any time for me whatsoever. Sure, it exports all of my recipes to a text file, but there are tags everywhere. And not useful tags, like as if I could put it into HTML and have it do cool things. Around every single ingredient in the list are amount, unit and foodstuff opening and ending tags. That's SIX tags I have to remove for each and every ingredient. Can you at least try to make this useful?

3. The whole units thing is less useful than it is annoying. I rarely have a need to multiply my recipe, since most of my recipes are approximated anyway. And having the ingredients in a separate bar really makes it difficult for me to add any notes on to my ingredients, since if I make the ingredients bar larger, that makes the text area smaller. Maybe the "Ingredient" field could wrap around or something, so you could see notes like "cut into small pieces" or "finely chopped" without having to resize the whole ingredient bar? I'd suggest a notes field, except that the combined width of such an ingredients field would probably leave no space at all for the actual recipe.   
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Comments

1 comments |

Pretty good but... - KHoke

Castor sugar is superfine granulated sugar. The finest grained granulated sugar available should work much of the time; otherwise pulverize it further by hand if it is crucial to the texture or dissolution in the final product.

As for built-in unit conversion, this would indeed be a useful feature, but perhaps the request should be considered in the context of allowing the rest of the world to convert US and Imperial units to metric (and more humbly, vice versa). Keep in mind that even US and Imperial units differ in annoying ways, and some kitchens around the world rely more on a scale than they do a measuring cup. So the request is far from trivial, and really can only be expected to be considered in the context of its utility to the author (this is freeware, right?).

Asking an Australian to rewrite some free recipes for the benefit of us is that sort of US-centric thing that can give offense...

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Friday, February 11 2005 @ 10:49 PM PST