I’m not known amongst my friends and family as a big cooker, but we do try to do family dinners more Sundays than not, so my sister and I tend to swap on cooking duties. Since we’re often not cooking in our own homes we’ve gotten in the habit of bringing recipes back and forth which can create a challenge with shopping and just keeping track of printouts.
I decided that getting recipes online was the best next step. At the start of my evaluation I wasn’t sure what my criteria was but as I looked at the myriad of options I started tracking it all down.
- Ease of recipe input – Trumping all, I want to be able to cut and paste ingredients and directions in one big lump rather than individual fields for quantity/item for each, an extra perk is if the program can automatically import based on common recipe sites/formats; I would like to be able to edit the info input as well as add misc. notes; I don’t want there to be mandatory fields that I don’t want to use.
- Categorization or tagging – I want to be able to search based not only by ingredient or kind of meal (main, side, etc.) but I also want to be able to search based on whether the recipe is one that is mine (vs. say sis’s) and whether I’ve cooked it or not.
- Web based – I wanted something that I wouldn’t have to own specific software or an app to view on a particular computer or be a mac specific thang.
- Public – Ideally I was interested in something that I could share my recipes with others.
The other nice to have would be a specific printing format, while things I don’t care so much about are an existing database of recipes and the ability to meal plan and do shopping.
After registering for a myriad of free sites and trying them out, it turns out I’m almost final on going with One tsp. They were the easiest to input and with a menu bar addition it “clip”s recipes. You can have up to 150 recipes and for $5/yr unlimited. The things it lacks are the public aspect, which isn’t that big of a deal (you can email your recipes to others), and the nice printing format (though of course the web page view is printable).
I’ve got a start with eleven recipes that I’ve used, input with a combination of clipped, cut & pasted from digital format, and typed from a hard copy. So far so good. Have you gone digital? Any thoughts or reccos?
