I need a digital recipe box.
August 30, 2011 10:32 AM Subscribe
Is there a website or low-cost software package to store recipes?
I did a Google search for this and came up with a mountain of junk-ware. Basically, I like to keep food cost low by planning a weekly menu. Unfortunately, I tend to pull recipes from 4 or 5 cookbooks or websites and that leaves me scrambling for references and making mid-week shopping trips for things I forgot.
What I'd love is a program or a website where I could store recipes and then just pull them out when I need them. The digital equivalent of a recipe box.
Bonus points if I could pluck, say, 12 recipes from the program and have it jam out a shopping list or for any other fun-time data crunching.
I did a Google search for this and came up with a mountain of junk-ware. Basically, I like to keep food cost low by planning a weekly menu. Unfortunately, I tend to pull recipes from 4 or 5 cookbooks or websites and that leaves me scrambling for references and making mid-week shopping trips for things I forgot.
What I'd love is a program or a website where I could store recipes and then just pull them out when I need them. The digital equivalent of a recipe box.
Bonus points if I could pluck, say, 12 recipes from the program and have it jam out a shopping list or for any other fun-time data crunching.
Best answer: I use Evernote to store my recipes, and to generate shopping lists for the various stores (Trader Joe's vs. Safeway vs. Costco). It won't crunch data for you, but you can tag your recipes and then pull up a recipe on your smartphone in the grocery aisle when you need to double check ingredients.
posted by ambrosia at 10:55 AM on August 30, 2011
posted by ambrosia at 10:55 AM on August 30, 2011
Evernote is fantastic. I use it for all of my recipes now. A few months ago, Evernote published a series of articles on how people use it for cooking.
posted by Silvertree at 10:57 AM on August 30, 2011
posted by Silvertree at 10:57 AM on August 30, 2011
Best answer: Paprika is allegedly working on a web app. Their Mac, iPad, and iPhone apps are fantastic. And they have a Grocery List feature.
posted by misterbrandt at 11:00 AM on August 30, 2011 [1 favorite]
posted by misterbrandt at 11:00 AM on August 30, 2011 [1 favorite]
Like Ambrosia, I use Evernote. It is free and easy, and can store a bunch of different formats (if you're not just cutting and pasting the recipes in as text).
posted by Admiral Haddock at 11:11 AM on August 30, 2011
posted by Admiral Haddock at 11:11 AM on August 30, 2011
I use Plan to Eat. It's a little buggy on the ipad, and it's subscription based, but it's custom designed for this exact purpose.
posted by libraryhead at 11:15 AM on August 30, 2011
posted by libraryhead at 11:15 AM on August 30, 2011
Honestly I would use a bunch of flat text files in a directory for this, possibly on my desktop or else in some easily-remembered location on my hard drive. If I wanted to get fancy then I might make spreadsheets which would allow me to increase ingredient requirements for number of servings. Maybe I'm just hopelessly retrograde.
posted by Scientist at 11:41 AM on August 30, 2011
posted by Scientist at 11:41 AM on August 30, 2011
I use a dedicated gmail account and use labels to categorise types of recipes as well as planned meals.
posted by tavegyl at 12:00 PM on August 30, 2011
posted by tavegyl at 12:00 PM on August 30, 2011
Came in here to also recommend Evernote. It's pretty neat.
posted by cmgonzalez at 12:11 PM on August 30, 2011
posted by cmgonzalez at 12:11 PM on August 30, 2011
Over the past month or so I have written something for this very task myself, using XML, XSLT, LaTeX, and a little bit of Haskell, with help from Emacs nXML mode. The good: it does exactly what I need it to do. The bad: I had to program it myself...
posted by massysett at 12:35 PM on August 30, 2011 [1 favorite]
posted by massysett at 12:35 PM on August 30, 2011 [1 favorite]
Sparkpeople is a weight loss website that will allow you to set a meal plan, them give you a weekly shopping list. You can switch out certain meals if they are not to your liking.
I typically use Del.ic.ious.com for bookmarking online recipes with tags. My tags include: recipes, veggie, pork, salad, cocktails, soup, chicken, etc., so I can drill-down according to what I feel like eating on any given day. I think the people who are using Evernote are doing something similar.
I use Google calendar to plan out our meals for the week, and put the shopping list for each meal in the calendar event. I share this calendar with my husband (who also shares meal-choosing and cooking duties) so we both have that day's grocery list and can pick up what we need on the way home. We prefer to buy everything fresh every day (or every other day) instead of frozen or canned goods. This is also fantastic because if, for example, I see we're out of toilet paper in the morning, I can add it to the list and he'll know he needs to get that if it's his turn to get groceries.
I also really, really love the smartphone app from AllRecipes.com, the dinner spinner. It's like a slot machine where you can select the parameters and it "spins" to pick a recipe for you at random. No shopping list, though you can favorite the different recipes.
posted by Brittanie at 1:38 PM on August 30, 2011
I typically use Del.ic.ious.com for bookmarking online recipes with tags. My tags include: recipes, veggie, pork, salad, cocktails, soup, chicken, etc., so I can drill-down according to what I feel like eating on any given day. I think the people who are using Evernote are doing something similar.
I use Google calendar to plan out our meals for the week, and put the shopping list for each meal in the calendar event. I share this calendar with my husband (who also shares meal-choosing and cooking duties) so we both have that day's grocery list and can pick up what we need on the way home. We prefer to buy everything fresh every day (or every other day) instead of frozen or canned goods. This is also fantastic because if, for example, I see we're out of toilet paper in the morning, I can add it to the list and he'll know he needs to get that if it's his turn to get groceries.
I also really, really love the smartphone app from AllRecipes.com, the dinner spinner. It's like a slot machine where you can select the parameters and it "spins" to pick a recipe for you at random. No shopping list, though you can favorite the different recipes.
posted by Brittanie at 1:38 PM on August 30, 2011
There are *lots*. I mostly use an ancient version of Yum (no longer available; mine is a couple versions and a developer--and three versions of OS X--old) and OneTsp.com, both of which can generate shopping lists, email or print recipes, etc. OneTsp can do the import-bookmarklet thing to suck in recipes from sites like food.com and epicurious, too, although it obviously won't work for places like Metafilter that don't have a standard structure--and I don't know about you, but this is where most of my new recipes come from anymore. OneTsp uses Markdown for formatting; I don't actually use the feature all that often, but it's nice to have. It does tags, photos, etc as well.
I would love to find something that lets me interleave ingredients with the steps that use them (f.ex., see Jon_Evil's pulled pork vs. OneTsp), but for now I save that for the keepers, which go in LaTeX with the cuisine package....
posted by FlyingMonkey at 1:52 PM on August 30, 2011
I would love to find something that lets me interleave ingredients with the steps that use them (f.ex., see Jon_Evil's pulled pork vs. OneTsp), but for now I save that for the keepers, which go in LaTeX with the cuisine package....
posted by FlyingMonkey at 1:52 PM on August 30, 2011
I've used onetsp a long time now for this purpose and I couldn't be happier with it. You can tag, generate shopping lists, import recipes from other places. The interface is clean and simple, nothing flashy but it covers my needs.
posted by Signy at 1:53 PM on August 30, 2011 [1 favorite]
posted by Signy at 1:53 PM on August 30, 2011 [1 favorite]
I know the recommendation was for someone else, but thanks for turning me onto onetsp.
posted by O9scar at 5:03 PM on August 30, 2011
posted by O9scar at 5:03 PM on August 30, 2011
Seconding the onetsp appreciation. I've just signed up and put in 3 of my favourite recipes (importing one from epicurios using the bookmarklet, which was a doddle). I see the free account has a maximum of 150 recipes. I'll be using this to advantage by not having to pay any money and editing the recipes to eventually have - MY 150 ALL TIME FAVOURITE RECIPES EVER.
posted by unliteral at 8:14 PM on August 30, 2011
posted by unliteral at 8:14 PM on August 30, 2011
I use Dropbox. I upload any recipe that I think I will cook more than once. I copy/paste recipes into text files, then upload to a Recipe folder in Dropbox. This way I can upload from any location (home, work, etc) and use them from any device (laptop, iPhone, etc)
posted by unceman at 8:42 AM on September 2, 2011
posted by unceman at 8:42 AM on September 2, 2011
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by noahv at 10:50 AM on August 30, 2011