5 Ways To Cook And Channel Julia Child On A Mac

Between email and browsing and calendars and spreadsheets and word processing and photos and music, we tend to forget the other things our Macs can do. Like help us foodies and chef wannabes to cook fabulous meals to die for.

Or, digitally speaking, use a Mac to channel the spirit of Julia Child and venture into French cuisine. Or, create and flourish in the mother of all recipe management systems. Me? I go for inspiration. Gone are the loaf of bread and a jug of wine, for thou.  My Mac and my kitchen and my dining room are all I need.

Julia Child and I have a lot in common (except that one of us is still living). We both go beyond six feet in height, sans heels, both of us love cooking and eating and talking, though not always in that order (a little butter never hurt anyone; Julia lived into her 90s).

If you love food as much as me you probably wonder what your Mac has in common with dining and the kitchen. After all, how many computers do you see on Rachael Ray or Emeril Lagasse’s TV shows?

Admittedly, I was inspired by the movie Julie & Julia, a marriage of old fashioned persistence in cooking with the digital (blogging) age and one of Apple’s utensils.

Being a digital kind of woman I’ve collected my share of Mac applications to keep track of what’s in my pantry, what’s in my kitchen, and all those recipes that are roaming around in my head. Here’s my list of the five best ways to track and manage what you cook by using your Mac.

A Cook’s Books

There’s more to managing recipes than just sticking them into a database and sorting through them until you find something you like. A Cook’s Books is a recipe manager and a nutritional reference tool.

Recipes can be imported from other Mac recipe managers, entered by hand, and scale the portions based upon the number of servings you need. Recipes can be found based on region, cooking method, author, and more. The planner lets you plan a whole day, a single meal, or a month. It even creates a shopping list after you list the contents of your pantry.

A Cook’s Books is a work in progress and may not have all the slick and sassy features of other digital cook books. It’s very thin on included recipes, and you’re in charge of all the work to make it useful.

Perfect Diet Tracker

Nutrition is all the rage these days, Julia Child’s fetish for butter notwithstanding, so Perfect Diet Tracker is the wise choice for those worried about what’s inside what they’re eating. PDT is nutrition oriented and contains a database of almost 50,000 food products.

Monitor your caloric intact, track your diet in the built-in diary, and create a personal diet plan that targets your specific dietary needs. Compare your diet and cooking habits with the Perfect Diet to improve your health. Counting calories and tracking nutritional information is automatic, as you go.

Perfect? Not quite. Lots of emphasis on diet, not so much on what’s good to eat and why.

Yummy Soup

I’m more in to soup these days than when I was younger (and slimmer). Yummy Soup is poorly named because it’s more than just soup. It comes with some features you’ll love, including the ability to add to your recipe collection by pulling recipes from web sites.

Yummy Soup also tracks what you drink with the Wine & Spirits manager (it’s always best to consult that feature after you’re done cooking, not before). Yummy Spirits? It’s easy to email recipe cards to friends, share with others through the Online Library, and sync up with your other Macs via Mobile Me.

Recipes can be displayed in full screen mode on your MacBook, and use your Apple Remote to have your Mac read the recipe to you via OS X’s built-in text to speech technology. Categorize recipes however you want in Smart Groups, and start cooking by comparing recipes with the ingredients you have on hand.

So, if you’re into cooking, into nutrition, and into using your Mac to help out in the kitchen, A Cook’s Books, Perfect Diet Tracker, and Yummy Soup are all good choices. But they’re not the top two on my list of what gets me in the Julia Child mode.

Continue to Page 2 for the top two cooking applications for Mac users.