What Features Do You Look For in Your Recipe Software?

Do you enjoy cooking? Do you dread going through all of those scraps of paper looking for that Vegetable and Beef Soup recipe that you make once a month? Well, I know that I do. I have absolutely TONS of hand written recipes, or I used to. Yeah, I kept the originals. They are now in a box in my garage, but they have been transformed into a marvel of technology. They're now in my Living Cookbook Recipe Software where I can quickly open them up, print a copy if I need to and save myself about 30 minutes looking through scraps of paper.

I set out on my journey to find the perfect recipe management software on the market. I looked high and low. I had an agenda. Not only did I want to organize my own personal recipes, but I wanted to be able to download recipes from the Internet into the software. I wanted to be able to create a cookbook from my own original recipes that I could either print and bind or upload to a website to sell. The software I chose had to do all of those things. I wanted the cookbooks to be in a standard cookbook format. I'm old fashioned, I like things in a familiar form. I wanted to be able to email the recipes to friends and family that always call around the holidays or when they're having a party and need a particular recipe. I keep wondering how I became the sole keeper of my mothers cornbread dressing recipe. I guess I'm the only one in the family that is organized. Also, I'm older now and I wanted to choose the font size customized to my eyes. No more having to wear glasses to read my recipes. Yeah!

One other very important piece of the puzzle was that I needed to know the exact nutritional analysis of each recipe. My brother was recently diagnosed with Type II Diabetes and anyone in that same boat knows that you can't just guess about what you're eating. You have to know for sure what's in the food you eat. This cookbook software has that built in. Their database is linked directly to the USDA Nutritional Tables and if the USDA makes any updates, you just go to the link in your software and upload the updates. Very important. Just be forewarned. That information my surprise you. Boy, do I ever wish that I hadn't put my Homemade Pimento Cheese recipe in there. Ouch, the fat grams. Oh well, don't they say that it's what you do most of the time that counts? I sure hope "they" are right.

This recipe software does a lot more than just the points I have covered, but these were the most important ones for me. If you're looking for cooking software, decide what your most important needs are and go from there.