![]() I think I’ll start there.ĭeborah Yao can be reached at dyao(at)ap.org. I still have that collection of French Provencal recipes somewhere around the house. “Julie & Julia” got me jazzed about cooking again. It’s about time I organized my recipes and BigOven makes it inexpensive, easy and engaging. BigOven’s custom cookbook is nice enough to be given away as a gift. Other recipe programs let you make a personal cookbook without an additional charge, but they can look like the amateur efforts they really are. It’s $29.95 and up, through, on top of the price for the software. Meal planning is easy: Clicking “Add Cal” inserts the recipe into a calendar.īigOven lets you create a custom cookbook as well, complete with a dedication page and colorful picture covers. Before heading to the grocery store, I can print the list out or send it to a Palm or Windows mobile device. Alternatively, I can drag and drop a recipe into the shopping list. So before I prepare a meal, I simply click “Add Shop” to get all the needed ingredients and their quantities onto my shopping list. I like the fact that it categorizes ingredients by grocery department. So a search for mom’s special turkey meatball recipe that was rated five stars by the family, and is Billy’s favorite, will float to the top if these terms were used in the search.īigOven also sports a shopping list that is a notch above those found in rival programs. You can narrow down a recipe by rating, ingredient, cuisine, title and tags. There are several search options to find a unique recipe. One downside: Custom tags only give you 15 characters, so “Billy’s favorites” actually came out as “Billy’s favorit.” ![]() There are preset tags or you can create your own, like “Billy’s favorite,” giving you an easy way to pull out Billy’s favorites whenever Billy’s a bit fussy. Recipes can be tagged for easier searching. I find a recipe and click on “import” and – bam! – it magically saves to my recipe box. I must confess that I got hooked on the “import” button. After I try their recipes, I’ll be sure to leave feedback. Why waste time on something substandard? In keeping with the French theme in “Julie & Julia,” I chose duck confit, bouillabaisse and Coquilles St. I wanted to fill it with other people’s recipes from, but only those given five-star ratings by other cooks like me. To create a virtual recipe box to store my favorite recipes, I simply clicked on “file” followed by “new recipe box” – which I named “French Cooking and more.” People can try the recipe and comment on it, but alas, after five days, still nary a response. It was my first time ever to share a recipe online, and I felt a rush. ![]() I could e-mail the recipe or share it on Facebook, but I opted to post the recipe to. I made a digital recipe from memory for my home rendition of pasta puttanesca, my best effort at replicating the divine version I once ate in Positano, Italy. There is no option for scanning recipes in, though even if there were, converting handwriting could be problematic and potentially more time-consuming because of corrections you might have to make. BigOven even has a free iPhone app that links to your free online account.īigOven offers a tutorial that walks you through the basic features, similar to other recipe programs.Ĭreating a recipe was a snap, although you have to type them all in, one by one. ![]() You can upload videos of yourself cooking, and perhaps be the next Internet star chef. Once you create a recipe, you can share it on the BigOven Web site, from which you can also add the recipe to Facebook. – is easy to use and versatile enough for even the most exacting cooks. At $29.95, BigOven also was the cheapest of the three finalists.īigOven – the brainchild of Steve Murch, an entrepreneur who previously held management positions at Microsoft Corp. It was my second choice.īigOven edged ahead with its extensive social-networking features. Living Cookbook, available for $34.95 though its Web site, had good training tutorials and the ability to create a cookbook for free, complete with a glossary of recipes. The $39.95 eChef software was the simplest to use, but it lacked some features I wanted, such as automatic nutrition calculation. ![]()
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