Sunday, January 10, 2010

The Living Cookbook


Are you inundated with recipes? Cut-outs, cookbooks, recipe cards, computer files, recipes your friends gave you, emails etc. Are they all stuffed into a binder or worse yet, a drawer? Do you not even know what your favorite recipes are half the time because all your recipes are such a jumbled mess? And when you finally do decide to make something good, you can't find the darned recipe anyway...

that's me.

I have recipes in a binder, and I have tons of cookbooks. I cut out a lot of recipes because I'm a sucker for a picture of something that looks delicious. I get recipes on the internet a lot, watch cooking shows, have a recipe box of old family recipes and I have a folder on my computer dedicated to recipes. Haha, the funniest thing ever is that I don't like to cook! Oh, but I love to bake. If it's doughy, or sweet, or thick & rich then I'm all over whipping it up and I'll spend hours if I know the result will be worthwhile.

Anyway, I'm done with all that recipe crap. I'm sick of that drawer of recipes mainly because I am very against the idea of a junk drawer in general and yet to take a look at my "recipe drawer", let's face it, it's junk. I don't know what's in there. I don't know what's in that binder. I have no idea what's in all my cookbooks and recipe box. I'd have to say there are one or two recipes I can visualize being in various cookbooks - things I refer to from time to time and so I keep the whole cookbook just for that one recipe. Seems stupid to me.

So I did something about it today. It's one of my items from my yesterday's desk dejunking. It was to get my arms wrapped around my recipe "problem".

I downloaded The Living Cookbook. Rather I downloaded the 30 day trial. I read the reviews and specs comparison of 10 different recipe organizational softwares and found The Living Cookbook to be one of the best. All said and done, it will cost $34 if I'm pleased which based on what it said it would do, I'm sure I will be.

It's actually downloading as I'm typing so when I'm through with this post, I'm going to start inputting all of my recipes and I'm anxious to see how it works. I'm very excited as this has been pressing on the back of my brain for a really long time - like every single time I open that forsaken drawer. It makes me cringe that it is so full that you sort of need to actually tug on it a bit to get it opened. So against my nature people.

So, I'll report on my findings later. TTFN.

6 backward glances:

josey said...

yes, yes and yes again...and guess what? i bought this software last year!! like you, i did the research and it seemed the best :) it's taken me several months to get motivated to start sorting thru my plastic bags full of recipes...but so far i'm really diggin the program!

it's a little quirky here and there, and i think you need to be a little computer savvy to circumvent some of it strange nuances...but i'm mostly happy with it. i plan on not only keeping an electronic copy but also printing out my recipes and putting them in page protectors in a binder to keep in the kitchen. i know, that's old-school *lol* but i just haven't made friends with the laptop in the kitchen yet! it's too dangerous of a place ;)

let me know how you like it!!

Amy said...

Josey, I'm loving it! I'm not loving having to reinput all of my recipes but once they're in there, meal planning and shopping will be a completely different experience than what I've had before. I'm so excited! The features on this program are amazing! And NO, i'm not keeping hard copies of these recipes! I might print them all out and put them in the safe deposit box just in case but I've overcome my fear of "laptop in the kitchen". I just put it on a counter that I refuse to put food on, lol.

Rachel said...

You really are the most organized chic I know. When you're all done can I get a copy of all those great recipes :) How do you have the energy to do all that you do?

Amy said...

absolutely Rachel! You can put them in your recipe drawer, lol!

Gail said...

I've had this software for several years and love it! My son has Type 1 Diabetes and must count his carbs to dose his insulin, so this software comes in handy for figuring out nutrition information for my own recipes. I highly recommend The Living Cookbook!!

The Galley Slave said...

Just downloading the trial myself! I think I am gonna love it.