It’s true Mac confession time. I love family, country, God, and food.
Not necessarily in that order. If the truth be told, I’m a foodie. I love food. Both cooking and eating.
Perhaps it’s my Spanish heritage. Perhaps it’s an oral fixation. Whatever it is, cooking is a way of life and I’m only too happy to incorporate my Mac into the meal planning part of Kayhill family values.
Recipes The Old Fashioned Way
Remember back in the early days of personal computing when computer ads displayed a PC-using woman in the kitchen, sorting through her digital recipes?
Ah yes, those were the days when a computer would give our lives fulfillment by balancing the checkbook and storing recipes.
We’ve come a long way, baby. Today, the Mac is the computer of choice among intelligent, discriminating adults, and useful Mac apps number in the tens of thousands.
Among the seemingly thousands of apps on my Mac are half a dozen that have to do with food (not including a few dozen bookmarks for various and sundry web sites on food and wine).
Tops on the list is MacGourmet, the perfect app gift for whoever controls the kitchen in your abode.
This is one Mac app with no pretense. It’s recipes. Not just your own recipes but recipes from all over the web world. There’s 80 recipes built-in to MacGourmet, but you can grab more from almost 100 recipes sites and grow your collection faster than political candidates grow annoying before an election.
Think of what iTunes would be if it had recipes instead of music. That’s MacGourmet. You get the familiar library look of recipes on the left, including your own lists.
Allow me to gloss over the fine details in one swell foop. MacGourmet features a built-in weekly meal planner. It also prints out PDF cookbooks using the Cookbook Builder plugin.
What recipe manager in the 21st century would be without nutritional information? It’s all the rage these days (which is why it’s so easy to find nutritional information at fast food joints). MacGourmet has an optional plugin that calculates nutritional information from the latest USDA database.
Wait a minute? Who brings a Mac into the kitchen?
“Not I,” said the Kayhill compound’s chief chef. That’s the work of iPhone or iPad. Guess what? MacGourmet also has an iPhone and iPad version so you can sync up recipes and notes from your Mac.
MacGourmet gives you the benefit of viewing recipe sites within the app, and collecting recipes from many dozens of online foodie sites.
You get step-by-step instructions as well as photos that depict how each recipe should look (assuming you followed the directions correctly).
Real foodies know the value of MasterCook and Meal-Master recipes, and MacGourmet imports both. It even provides a metric conversion in case you make noodles by the kilometer instead of the mile.
If you can only afford one Mac cookbook app, this is the one. And it may be the only one you can afford. It’s priced proudly, and each of the plugins (Cookbook, Mealplan, Nutrition, etc.) are extra cost, and so are the iPhone and iPad apps.
About Alexis Kayhill
I used to use MacGourmet Deluxe, but found Shop ‘N Cook Pro to be more helpful. It’s more expensive, but has recipe costing, and intelligently imports recipes pretty well with copy and paste. They have cheaper versions if you don’t need the costing info. I tried other ones like SousChef, and while good, not as good as Shop ‘NCook.
Alexis…you’ve nailed it with your opinions of MacGourmet (though the Deluxe version really is better). I’ve spent more than a decade using and testing Mac cooking software and there simply is none better…NONE! While others have one or two competitive features, they don’t hold a candle to putting everything together in such a complete package. Add to that the ability to import recipes from nearly anywhere, and have your favorite daily recipes come to your inbox and then import them in seconds to MacGourmet, and you have a winner.
Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes! MacGourmet is to die for. If you’re serious about cooking, then get both the iPad (or iPhone) and Mac version. SousChef is good. Shop ‘NCook is OK, but rather bland. Each has their strong points and personality, but MacGourmet is the standard bearer. Recipes, nutrition (extra cost), and an option to print out your own personal PDF cookbook. It makes an awesome gift, too.