Recipe software

In a reckless moment last Saturday I decided to reorganize the kitchen; after a lot of sweating, swearing and wondering “where the f**k did that come form� the layout is better but has brought me face to face with the problem of too many recipes.

The books can be moved somewhere else but the printouts, copies, cutouts and scribbled notes all have to go, which is why I’m searching for recipe applications that would enable me to:-

1. Load my own recipes into the program
2. Remind me when ingredients are going to expire
3. Allow me to search for recipes by listing ingredients to hand.

I’m searching for suitable applications (have to look busy this afternoon) , but if anybody has any recommendations or warnings on applications to avoid I would appreciate it.

Have you seen allrecipes.com? It's free to use and you can do 1 and 3 of your points above. You can choose US or Metric for your measurements, as well as adjust the serving sizes to get quick measurements.

Overkill.

You want software to remind you when your food is out of date? Seriously, that is pretty weird, ESPECIALLY in Germany - best before dates are a crap thing to go by in any country really; half the time things are fine waaaay beyond the BBD, and stuff at Aldi can be found rotting away well before the BBD, so it's a crap thing to go by. If you wanna keep your recipes in digital form, than ok, type them in notepad, but entering all the best before dates of everything you buy is gonna be more effort than just keeping a rough idea of what you have in the fantastic filing cabinet known as your brain.

If you are that interested in finding software solutions to every minute facet of your daily life, then go the whole hog and learn to program a bit. Knocking together a little application to suit your purposes would take next to no time.

dcgirl, thanks fo the tip about allrecipes.com, that's one of the items I was considering.

Don - no I don't want to track every sell by/use by date, I'm not that anal and I agree with you about most such info being worthless.

Because I live out in the boonies I end up bulk buying when I go up to Munich and so have tons of food to choose from and while I have used some foods (beans, pulses, lentils etc) months beyond their date without any problems others (poppadoms, nans) have been really bland if used long after the date so I just want something to remind myself that, hidden in a cupboard somewhere, is an item I best get round to cooking.

I agree with you about ther programming and am trying to get to grips with databases but I'm also a lazy bastard who wont hesitate to use an easy option.

Stick them all in Access you lazy sod...I have to see this reorganised kitchen!!

- I can't be bothered getting angry over that one.