For Those of Us That Like To Cook

I’ve found that DT is an excellent tool to manage recipes.

When I find an interesting recipe on the web at one of the many cooking websites, I “Save To DevonThink” and store in a “Recipes” Group / Folder in DevonThink.

DT’s text searching feature makes it easy to retrieve recipes when all I can remember is one or more key words (e.g ginger + salmon).

I have hundreds of recipes in DT and found it to be much better for this purpose than a typical data base (FileMaker for example) because it eliminates all the data entry while still being totally searchable.

Scott

yep,
my recepies-group is one of those that I visit when I want to relax from the serious jobs… But – what is more serious than having good food? :laughing:

Maria

I’m glad I’m not the only one to store recipes in DEVONthink. It’s also a great place for book/CD/DVD reviews, all those things I glance at, think “Gee, I’d like to read/hear/watch that” and then have the info evanesce from my memory-not-upgradable brain. That’s the great thing about this application; not only do I have masses of serious work/research/writings stored here but all the lighter stuff–halibut+basil, Holmes+Kim, jazz Joan, New Zealand+whale–really anadvantage this time of year when people say “What do you want?” and I can actually tell them This Book or This CD or . . … But I feel slightly guilty; all those poor PC folks think I’ve gotten organized. And all I’ve done is buy DEVONthink, set up all the work stuff, and add one folder for food and one for fun. :stuck_out_tongue:

I like to save my recipes in DEVONthink. I like how Filemaker has editable templates I can use to view and edit files, but DEVONthink’s search and clip storage capabilities are fantastic.

(I write and develop my own recipes.)

Filemaker hasn’t done a great job of keeping up with the times, IMHO. If they made Filemaker Pro a professional version of Bento, I’d probably use that instead of DTP. But Bento is made for fifth-graders and Filemaker Pro is hideous and practically unusable…

This is a situation where semi-structured documents would be very useful, I think. My wife has a lot of recipes in her database that we clipped from various locations, but there’s no consistent style – and my wife and I are both obsessive-compulsive like that :slight_smile:

I’ve recently started using MacGourmet. As a recipe-oriented program it can do useful things like rescale recipes and put together shopping lists. I’m mostly using it to consolidate my most-used recipes from five or six cookbooks into one place, so the data entry step is unfortunately unavoidable, but not too tedious for just a few at a time.

Worth a look.

Katherine

You could try YummySoup. The “any site web importer” will also work with text, so you can import a text file of a recipe, select blocks of text, mark them as title, ingredients, directions, cooking time, etc., and then import them as a structured recipe. So, you don’t have to re-type your recipe into little boxes, but still seems like extra work if you already have your recipe in a database.