I’m not much of a cook. I would much rather have someone take me to dinner or lunch than whip up something from scratch at home.
But I can cook soup. All kinds of soups. I think that’s the only food the Scots truly understand. At least, my soups are the only thing I cook that my father dares to eat.
I’ve tried to use my Mac and various cooking and recipe managers. Most Mac software that has anything to do with the kitchen does a good job of storing recipes, adding cooking hints, downloading information from the internet.
Surprisingly, my Mac refuses to do the actual cooking part. Note to Apple: Add cooking feature to OS X Snow Leopard.
Enter YummySoup from Hungry Seacow Software. The only thing Yummy Soup doesn’t do on my Mac is cook for me.
One thing Yummy Soup does that came as a surprise was to instill the ‘I want to try that’ attitude into my previously anemic cooking intentions. Making preparation easy is a big part of reducing the tedium of cooking for me.
Yummy Soup covers four basic areas, the last of which is to actually Cook the creation you’ve prepared. The first is to organize. Think of it as digital recipe and ingredient collecting.
Pull recipes from the web, including importation of complete recipes from any web site. Add photos for the finished meal, or the step-by-step preparation process. Generate a list of ingredients needed for a particular recipe.
You can even keep track of non-soup-like items such as beer, wine, liquor, because there’s a built in Wine & Spirits manager. Speaking of managing, that’s why you use an application like Yummy Soup. It manages recipes, ingredients, groups of each, subgroups of each.
It just doesn’t cook for you. Or, stir.
Once organized, now you can share. All recipes, including ingredient lists, digital photos, can be emailed and shared with others, or seamlessly integrated into Yummy Soup’s Online Library.
Shopping is made easier, too, because you can plan meals ahead, then print out a list of what ingredients you need. This would be an ultra cool cooking utility if it had some way to know what ingredients you already have on hand.
This shortcoming is why I have 9 jars of Prego, and 11 cans of lima beans in the pantry.
In the end, it’s all about the cooking part, and Mac recipe managers take the details into the kitchen. Yummy Soup lets you use a notebook in the kitchen (please, guys, work on an iPhone version—I promise not to drop my phone into the soup ever again).
You can view the recipes on your Mac notebook using the Apple Remote. Full screen. Speech support reads selections and instructions for you while you cook.
Yummy Soup is an addictive Mac application, but poorly named. I downloaded it because about all I can do is soup. Yummy. Soup. Get it? However, it’s far more than just mere soup. Salads. Veggies. Meats. Baking. Deserts. It’s all in there. It’s all managed and usable. It’s only $20.
I figure that if I can use it to whip up a meal and have survivors afterwards, it’s gotta be worthwhile to other Mac users.
About Kate MacKenzie
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