Living Cookbook

My new find: a recipe organizing software! I am in heaven!


For those of you who don't know, I have been on this crazy quest to get prices for all of the food items that I buy regularly (and even some that aren't so regular). In college I took a "home ec" class and in it we had to calculate the cost of the meals. The teacher had a huge binder with every ingredient broken down to how much it would cost per cup, TB, tsp, etc. So since Greg and I are sticking to a budget finally (and doing pretty good) I have found that I only have about $2.70 per meal for all three of us! That's less than $8 a day for all of the food we consume!! Oh boy, is that a task. So I started collecting prices to see how much each recipe costs us and find out which ones we really splurge on and which ones are cheaper than cheap (spaghetti and tostadas with home made beans win).

However it is extremely time consuming getting these prices and having Axton with me doesn't make it an easy task. Plus I feel a bit awkward carrying around a notebook and going isle by isle writing down prices without buying anything, oh the looks I get! Needless to say I only got Costco's list done and it took me about a week, several hours a day, of walking down the isles. Then I plugged it all into my computer and low and behold our computer crashed, leaving me to do it all over again! Luckily I had kept most of my handwritten notes instead of throwing them away when I was done.

So I got burnt out! I had looked up programs before to see if anyone had come out with what I was trying to do but my search turned up nothing, I don't know how that happened though. So I was in office max checking out spyware cds when low and behold I see a recipe organizer!! It was $40 and I wasn't sure if it did everything I wanted so I decided to go home and research it again. Then I found it. A website rating the top 10 programs. Unfortunately the one I really wanted (and it was cheaper) isn't compatible with Windows Vista (darn this new computer) so I had to settle for my second option (the sites #3 pick). It was a little cheaper than the one I had originally seen but it has everything I want!!

They have about 10,000 ingredients (just a few- horse, squirrel, moose, ostrich, yup not even kidding!) with average national prices for all of them. No more price shopping for me! Ok, that's a lie. You can also add your own stores and their prices manually if you want to (which I am just crazy enough to do) so that you get more accurate pricing. But on top of this you can add any recipe you want, if you get it from the internet or anything off the computer such as word, etc, it will automatically convert it to the program for you or you can manually enter them in. The recipes will all generate nutritional info for you so if you are worried about calories, or doing a diet such as diabetic, carbs, etc, you can create menus based off of that. I think it is awesome! You can creat menus, shopping list, etc! Plus Greg and I can both rate each recipe so I know which ones we both like, Greg is more honest when filling the ratings out than he is when I ask him as he's eating it! Plus I can email any of these recipes to others, and if anyone else has any kind of software similar to this I can get all of theirs!

I am in heaven!! It is really time consuming up front to get all my info in it but I am pretty confident that once I do, it is going to make planning meals so much better, easier, and faster!