My new recipe manager

I have found a recipe manager that I love. Chris (greatest most wonderful husband ever) found it and downloaded it for me and it has a couple of problems but so far, it basically has everything I need in recipe software and I didn't have to pay a thing.

First I enter a recipe - name, category, # of servings, cuisine type, source, ingredients, instructions. Save. View recipe card. Can then print if I want. Or just save and print later like when I actually want to use it. We used to use 4x6 note cards for recipes but then Chris discovered that he liked that I typed them into Word one month because then he could just print it out, get it all messy, write on it and then just throw it away.


Okay let's say I have entered 20 recipes and I am meal planning for the week. I am going to go over to shopping list and I am going to add 5 recipes. It then loads all the ingredients for these recipes into my shopping list. Based on previous shopping lists, it has a list of things I need for the recipe that are in my pantry. I scan the list to see if I need to add any of these items back into my grocery list. I don't so then I add the misc items to my list like milk and ice cream. I then print my grocery list nicely divided into categories. If I was really geeky, I would make my categories the aisle numbers of my grocery store. Another project for another day. Right now I have to concentrate on adding recipes.

It also has a search feature. So I can enter basil and it will give me all my basil recipes. Once I get this going, this will greatly help me re-use my spices that I pay astronomical prices for a small little pack and then use one tablespoon. It can do one more than one ingredient too.

I couldn't get the nutritional information to work correctly but it seemed like it would be cool if it worked. I don't really care about nutrition info anyway. You can look at a recipe and just know whether it is good for you or not. Mmm butter and cheese. I also could not get it to a load an image but I don't really care about that either.

It does have a thing where I can save as an html file. One of my friends recently asked me if I could post my recipes online which I thought was a good idea so I may have an Amanda's cookbook online soon.

Ooh another feature that it needs that no one would ever think of but I need recipe manager meets frugal 101. I would like to be able to enter the approximate price of the ingredients and have it total the whole recipe and then let me sort my recipes by price. This would really help me like in the case of April where I only $75 left to spend on groceries but have 2 weeks left. I may go a little over unless we really do eat a lot of mac n cheese. But this is a total geek idea that I don't think any recipe manager has ever implemented. Chris says that he is one of the best python programmers in the world so he said he would look at the source code for it. I neeeed this function added!

Here's a link to the recipe manager's website - http://grecipe-manager.sourceforge.net/