| Since I really enjoy reading recipes and trying new things out,
I have the following solution, which depends on the recipes ...
I have four 'diary' books -- cloth bound, blank pages from a bookstore
(on sale of course): one for beverages (hot, cold, alcoholic, punches),
one for candy (choc., not choc!), one for condiments (relishes,
chutneys, sauces) and one for jellies (jams, preserves). I use
a glue stick to paste the recipes in the book.
I use el cheapo photo albums for the majority of the recipes, one
book for chicken, one for red meat, one for vegetables, one for
pasta, one for seafood, one for desserts, one for breads, and so
on. When I fill one, I just start another. The ability to wipe
the page clean is the bonus.
To save those collections of recipes (especially collections of
cookies) I purchased clear 8 1/2" x 11" pockets with three-hole
punching. I slip the whole article in there and list the recipes
out, putting that up front so I can easily scan the contents of
the binder to find a recipe.
I do use an index card size box for recipes from friends. I keep
a couple of sandwich size plastic bags in the box, too, so that
when I take a card out, I slip it in the 'protector'. I have
another box which contains the recipes from the World Book Encyclopedia
series "Christmas Around the World", all of which are on 3" x 5"
cards.
I have another binder with just pockets in it. Then, when I see
a recipe I want, I cut it out and put it in a pocket (labelled,
of course). When the pocket gets full, or when I'm in the mood
and have the time, I move the recipe to its book.
My last binder is for all kinds of tips -- how much batter for my
cake pans, information on cooking (including the Butterball line)
and other useful stuff. Heavy stock blank paper, three hole punched,
works.
I get my supplies at Staples (Boston area) and watch for sales on
the photo albums. I developed this whole system in pieces -- I
have been at it for about ten years. I just couldn't find ONE way
to do things that solved all the problems. The one thing I learned
(of course the hard way) was to save all the lousy recipes I tried.
I write on it "NEVER AGAIN" and that way avoid falling for the same
recipe twice!
Hope one of these ideas helps!
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| > <<< Note 2077.8 by BLUMON::QUODLING "Oooooh, Nice Software...." >>>
>
> And if you have a macintosh, there are a couple of neat Hypercard
> stacks for storing recipes...
Here is a review of a recipe database, extracted from the Mac's 'Tidbits'
Mangia!
-------
One of the greatest lies foisted on the unsuspecting computer
shopper of ten years ago was "You can use it to keep your
recipes." Yeah, sure. Essentially no one ever kept their recipes
in a database file because it's not a simple task. I'm pleased to
report that the days of avoiding the computer for recipe keeping
are over, thanks to Upstill Software's Mangia.
Mangia is essentially a muscular relational database dedicated to
making it easy to enter, find, and display recipes. The problem
with keeping recipes on the computer was not the database engines,
but the interface. I saw an alpha version of Mangia about a year
and a half ago, and thought it was awful. Then, when I ran into
Steve Upstill's booth at Macworld Boston, I was stunned - the ugly
duckling had turned into a swan! Steve cleaned up the interface,
simplified the controls, added color judiciously, and polished
Mangia almost beyond recognition.
I cook, I cook a fair amount, and people tell me I cook pretty
well. Nonetheless, I don't like spending time looking for recipes.
Over the years, Tonya and I have found a system that ensures we
make dinner even when we are too tired think of anything to cook.
Every weekend, we make a weekly menu - just a list of days and the
meals we want to eat. Then we make a shopping list and buy
everything we need for the next week. The beauty of this system,
aside from avoiding grilled cheese every night, is that we can
look back through old menus for inspiration.
Mangia arrived and I dove in, gasping with delight at the nice
touches, including the manual, which takes the unique approach of
"two-minute lessons" that occupy a single page each. This
technique works well in that most tasks are covered in a two-
minute lesson, and the manual has an engagingly informal tone that
keeps you reading once you start. The only drawback is that when
something isn't covered in the manual or online help, you're on
your own.
When you launch Mangia, it presents you with a Recipe Browser
window that shows the recipes in open cookbooks (of which Mangia
ships with two, Mangia Miscellany and Cooks Redux, a collection of
recipes from the late Cooks Magazine). A file to Mangia is a
cookbook, and you can have a number of them. Within the Recipe
Browser the recipes are sorted alphabetically, but you can specify
dividers to differentiate by type of dish, main ingredient,
season, and so on.
If you want to find a specific type of recipe, or recipes with
specific ingredients, Mangia includes several powerful methods of
doing just that. Once you've found one, double-clicking on the
name displays the recipe (nicely formatted, and you can pick from
multiple formats or design your own), so you can see if you want
to make it, and dragging it to (or clicking on) a Recipe Clipboard
button adds it to the Recipe Clipboard. You use the Recipe
Clipboard as a temporary corral for recipes until you print a
shopping list. You can also define what Mangia calls "meals" in
the Recipe Clipboard - calling them "menus" would have been too
confusing. Because of our system, I define a meal for each day of
the week.
Once you have selected a number of recipes and added them to meals
if you wish, you can select some or all and ask Mangia to print a
shopping list. The time-honored problem with shopping lists is
that the Mac has no way of determining what's already on your
shelves. Mangia isn't omniscient, but it uses an clever method of
limiting the problem. When you generate a shopping list, the
ingredients are listed for each recipe, and an asterisk appears
next to those in your pantry. You then scan down the list and mark
each item as to whether or not you actually have it. Needless to
say, once you mark something as existing in your pantry, it's
still there the next time you use Mangia. Once you've identified
all the items you need to buy, you can select the pantry items and
delete them from the list before printing the list with items
optionally sorted by section of the store (you can modify this for
your store) and with the recipe name and quantity needed next to
each item.
This works wonderfully if you can limit yourself to the recipes
Mangia provides, but we all have some favorites that won't be in
Mangia's repertoire. Although Upstill Software is working on
releasing more cookbooks (actually turning paper cookbooks into
Mangia files) for the moment, there aren't many out there. I've
typed in about 30 of our main recipes, and someone posted a set of
10 recipes of Irish Mist Desserts to the Internet. If you wish to
enter recipes, it's easy - just a matter of filling in various
data entry screens. The tricky part is that to ensure the
capability to track the Pantry and to scale recipes, Mangia
requires that you use (or add) specific terms in its dictionary.
That means if you come up with an ingredient that isn't in Mangia,
you must add it manually. However, because Mangia knows how all of
its ingredients are spelled, it has a clever feature that tells
you graphically when it knows the ingredient you're trying to type
and can finish it for you. If you want to use a menu instead,
Mangia shows the ingredients hierarchically, which would be clumsy
without Mangia's sticky menus option to simulates a click-lock.
Mangia isn't perfect. It's a bit slow, and there are a few
interface lapses here and there in the program, such as the Enter
key not selecting the default button in a dialog. The program is
not the most stable I've used, but it's generally OK and since it
saves everything all the time, it's hard to lose data (still, back
up personal cookbooks, just in case). There are a few drawbacks to
the philosophy as well - for instance, most people don't just buy
food at the grocery store, but Mangia can't tell you when you're
out of tissues, for instance, unless you do like we did and make a
recipe called Regular Shopping Items that contains ingredients for
the non-food miscellany that we buy frequently. We've come up with
a few other workarounds such as empty recipes called Dining Out
and Leftovers, since we want place holders for meals we don't cook
but don't want anything appearing in the shopping list.
It's not perfection that I ask for these days, but responsiveness,
which Steve Upstill has provided in spades. One of the first
things I did was try to print a list of my meals on a single page,
and I couldn't. I sent Steve email asking about it, and he
responded by sending a new version within a few days - it seems
that the necessary button had somehow moved offscreen in the Print
dialog. That's what I call customer service, and Steve has been
open to suggestions and comments along the way.
Right now, Mangia suffers mainly from a lack of cookbooks. There's
a solution out there. It's called the Usenet Cookbook, and
consists of a large number of recipes submitted by Usenet readers
over the years. I have no idea of the details surrounding it, but
I noticed that you can search it via WAIS and that all the recipes
have a rigid format. It would take programming work, but Steve
said he's willing to help out with a conversion program if anyone
wants to figure out how to convert these text files into a Mangia
cookbook.
In any event, Mangia is by far the best cooking program I've seen.
If you're looking for the perfect present for a Mac chef, I highly
recommend Mangia. You can find a demo that I uploaded a while back
on <sumex-aim.stanford.edu> as:
/info-mac/app/mangia-demo.hqx
Mangia sells for the idiosyncratic price of $49.93 (plus $3
shipping and sales tax in California if you order direct from
Upstill Software).
Upstill Software -- 800/JOT-DOWN -- 510/486-0761
[email protected]
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| Re .9: Sounds pretty neat - I don't suppose there's a PC version, is
there?
On the manual recipe management front: I've spent the last couple of
evenings going through my "files" - that is, the accordion folder in
which I had stuffed a bunch of clipped recipes, loosely sorted by main
ingredient. When the stack of clippings that hadn't even been put in
the folder got too high to see over ;-), I decided it was time to take
action, and being unwilling to just chuck the lot (by far the most
efficient option), I started going through them in earnest. My scheme,
such as it is, makes use of a 3-ring binder with plastic-overlay pages,
as mentioned previously; the main drawback is that any recipe that uses
both sides of its card or clipping runs the risk of losing some data if
the back side sticks to the page. (I find that one un-looked-for
advantage of using the pages is that it makes recipe-screening easier;
if I've got an extra recipe in a certain category, and I don't have any
room left on the page, I'm more likely to throw the recipe away than to
start a new page just for it.)
I included some photos of appetizing-looking food, because a bunch of
yellowing clippings just doesn't whet my appetite. And I tried to boil
down the duplicates (does anybody else have a "hot" food topic such
that they'll clip any recipe that even mentions that ingredient? Don't
ask how many artichoke clippings I had). But it remains to be seen
whether having all the clippings readily at hand in the book will
encourage me to use them...
-b
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