Introduction
Including Publisher’s Summary
This is the
fourth of five recipe management related article I’ve written for this
September, macC issue. Key to understanding my review criterion is the first
article in which I define potentially useful functions (how things work) and
features (toys and tools) for any recipe management product. [See: Recipe Managers
aka Cookware Software Necessary Functions and Features.] For the reviews of other recipe managers
see the rest of this issue of macC.
According to its
developer, CookWare Deluxe [CWD] makes collecting and organizing your recipes
really simple. The concept of CookWare Deluxe is to be very easy to use without
giving up features. Dragging and dropping recipes into
CookWare Deluxe makes adding recipes really fast. You can drag recipes from
your Internet browser or word processor directly into CookWare Deluxe, add an
image or a video, categorize it and you're finished. I agree, read on…
Cookware Deluxe Main Window with its Menubar — Just for Recipe Browsing
Getting
Started
This
is a well-developed Macintosh application. Drag it to your applications folder.
Start using it in demo mode or type in a password. Decide which preference
settings you prefer. Check out any readme files. You’re good to go. If you’re new to this kind of software,
genre, check out one or more of the following:
- A
Users Manual, included in the vendor download or its help files, or
- Start
to Mac-around and see what you can do from scratch.
Wild Mushroom Spring
Rolls
Using the Software
I took three approaches toward testing this product. First,
I attempted to individually import a test set of recipes from my own collection.
Then I downloaded the CWD recipe collection packs, installed them and browsed
to see how these affected the browse, search and other software functions.
The software comes with 350 high quality
recipes, with two other recipe sets available for modest prices. Recipe Set 1 includes
750 recipes for $6.95 and Recipe Set 2 contains 470 recipes for $3.95.]
According to the developer, these recipes are hand-selected because they're
delicious and/or classic. Finally, I found a large collection of Master
Cooks recipes {See the PS for Links} and added
a set of 631 Chinese recipes. Hurrah, it all worked.
Added Review Focus — I was particular interested in the scope and flexibility of category creation including the ease changing (adding or deleting
listed items.) CWD comes with four categories; Cookbooks, Course, Main
Ingredient and Region.
One
always-disappointing aspect of the categories (aka classifications) in CWD or
any other product is that I view the world though different glasses than the
developers. I like to have a
unique category called cooking methods; so hope that someone will allow, the
addition of top-level categories.
Why Is
This Important — Categorizing
recipes makes it easier to group related recipes together and to create Menus.
It is also an order of magnitude easier to find an individual or group of
recipes by searching for its combined characteristics (labels) including the
main ingredients, cooking method, Special diet (often defined in cookbooks) and
region or cookbook. These are like the chapter headings, indices, and cutout
tabs in recipe books or index boxes full of recipes.
An analogy to searching with such
tags {category-item} would be,
using a music database for a 1,000+ CD collection, to find all the albums on
which Paul Desmond plays Take the “A” Train. Alternatively, how may different
versions {jazz, folk, blues, bluegrass) of the St James Infirmary Blues do I
own.
Test Set for Testing Importing
Features — This test set included imports
from several of my favorite websites, imports of several PDF formatted recipes,
and finally importing from MSW documents in txt, rtf
and doc formats. All recipes I
used had images associated with them. Some of my recipes, in addition, had tips
and background information. Although I usually combine cooking directions and
tips into the same ‘window’ I prefer to keep background discussion found on
many food blogs separate. The next few sections summarize my experiences with
the product, sometime in the developer’s words if they exactly fit
my test results.
Initial
Blank New Recipe Window
Adding Recipes — The publishers claim “Simply
drag a recipes from your Web browser or Word Processor directly into CookWare Deluxe,
categorize it and you're finished!” This was the first thing I tested. It
couldn’t be that easy, could it? Yes it indeed was. Of all the products I’ve
whether reviewed or tested for personal use, the Cookware deluxe software was
the simplest when adding new recipes. This included either typing in the
details manually, or moving in formation from an external (to CWD) such as from
a website, PDF or MS Word document. What you add is auto saved, so you don’t
have to remember to do it yourself.
To
get started just use the command ?-N. Recipe Details window is where recipes are viewed and
where new recipes are created. After you have typed in your recipe or dragged
it from some other source, click the Eraser icon to automatically reformat
(clean-up) entered text to make your recipes consistent throughout your
collection.
It’s
best to add additional information such as: Rating, Servings, Preheat,
Difficulty, Prep time, Inactive time, Cook time and a Photo. This information is very helpful when
finding recipes, knowing how long it will take to make, how difficult it is,
and how many people it will feed, etc.
Adding
a Picture (from the developers User Manual) — Each recipe can hold two photos. You
can easily add a photo by dragging it in from a Web browser or add it using the
“+” [B] button
(located at the bottom of the photo frame). In addition, you can add photos by
using the “Add/Delete Main Photo”, “Add/Delete Alt Photo” or “Add/Delete QuickTime
Movie” Menus found under the “Recipe Tools” Menu. When using the “+” button or
a Menu function, a dialog box asking to locate the photo will be presented.
The
dialog box contains a checkbox in the lower corner “Store only a reference
to the file”. Make
sure this checkbox is unchecked;
otherwise, your photos will not be exported on back up. Here’s what that
checkmark does... when it’s checked, it stores an “Alias” of the photo in
CookWare Deluxe but not the actual photo, it’s just a link to the photo stored
somewhere on your Hard Drive. So when you perform a backup it doesn’t get the
photo because it’s not really in CookWare Deluxe.
[A] This
indicator will show when there is a photo or movie inside the Alt tab - it’s
simply a shortcut so you don’t have to look to see if it contains anything.
[C] Displays
a larger version of the photos.
There
are a large number of acceptable image formats: psd, gif, pct, eps, jpg, mac,
tiff and png. These include windows only formats: bmp, pcx, wmf, sld, drw, pic
and cgm. Quick-Time movies can also be added.
Adding/Changing
Categories—One tool that makes searching a
large collection easier is the ability to label recipes with category information.
CWD comes with five predefined categories; beverage (wine and beer mostly), cookbooks,
course, main ingredient and region. Of these, I found the main ingredients and regions the most useful.
I’m
not a wine collector or drinker and use vin ordinaire to cook with, so ignored the beverage category. Although the and course category
was potentially useful, I often find my self eating things like frittatas and
omelets for dinner and a salad from breakfast so my selections were potentially
redundant. Perhaps the most troublesome category to me was the cookbook category. It mixes what I’d call cuisine
types (barbeque, comfort food, curries, kebobs) with cooking methods (steaming,
wok cooking, pressure cooking, out door grilling). In addition items like
Caribbean, Mediterranean, flavors of Asia or of India belong on the regional
list.
See
‘discomforts’ for a deeper insight into my concerns with categories as provided.
The occasional triple redundancy makes searching awkward so I obliterate the
items that are redundant within a category. This is neither a fast or completely
satisfactory approach since I make input mistakes. These are correctable, but
time never-the-less consuming. Since I have over the years, created a document
that contains almost all of item I want to index, by category. A batch cut and
paste would be nice. Most of you will not likely do more then double or triple
CWD category item lists.
Make
no mistake, those missing or those mismatches between an item and the category
in which it is listed can easily, if time consuming, be fixed to meet my picky
standards. Well almost. If you correct the category set in CWD into which
you’ve added lots of recipes, you must manually, yes one at a time, redesignate
(select and check) the specific category item in each affected recipe. Indeed
when adding Master Cooks recipes, which were seldom internally categorized, I had to manually, create
any needed category-list tags for each interesting recipe to ease finding it. After all I’ve now
have almost 2500 recipes in my review CWD test collection; tag of miss out on
great recipes. The good news is that when your importing items one at a time,
making is easy. If you need a new tag [CookWare Deluxe Menu > Recipe Detail
View > Recipe Tools > Edit Categories] its just as easy.
Importing
Recipes —CookWare Deluxe only imports files that have been exported
from it or from the Extra Recipes Sets and some versions of MasterCook.
CookWare Deluxe does not import recipes from other recipe software makers or
text files, etc.
The Five Import Functions Are:
- Import
Past CookWare Recipes: to import your backup from previous versions of
CookWare Deluxe.
- Import
Extra Recipe Sets: to import the Extra Recipes Sets that are available for
purchase.
- Import
Backup Folder: for importing a CookWare Deluxe 4.2 or greater backup
folder.
- Import
Collected Recipes Folder: to import your Collected Recipes folder. This is
useful for synchronizing files between computers.
- Import
MasterCook Recipes: to import .mxp files exported from MasterCook. Note -
this import generally takes a very long time to process.
To import MasterCook recipes go to the
File Menu and choose Import, then Import MasterCook Recipes. These recipes take
an extremely long time to import! CookWare Deluxe has to remove thousands of
characters and try to figure out what goes where. It’s doing an incredible
amount of calculations, so please be patient and Do Not Force Quit. Be sure
to start this process when you have plenty of time to wait for the computer. Fortunately,
this only needs to be performed one time since after it’s imported it will be
formatted correctly for CookWare Deluxe. The users guide also provides
instructions for exporting recipes from MasterCooks to ease importing them into
CWD.
Annotated
Additional Selected Key Features List (from
the publishers website}
Shopping Lists— One of the features of CookWare
Deluxe is it's ability to create a Shopping List ready to take to the market or
maybe email it to your spouse for pick-up on the way home.
Enhancing Your Recipes— No its not just adding a clove
of garlic, its adding overall useful background information to your recipes.
Add nutritional data, food pairing, use the quantity conversions to feed a
crowd, capture cooking temperatures and more in your recipes. Alas adding
background is a one at a time action; but that’s the way most of us cook
— once recipe at a time. Of course, you only have to add such information
once — CWD remembers.
In addition, if
you have Internet access, helpful Internet resources, including recipe
searching are available from within CookWare Deluxe. Of course what you find to
cook, can be transferred to anew recipe in your collection. Find additional
recipes with a couple clicks by using a built-in Web
Resource Helper. (I did not test this web associated feature since I prefer
recipe hunting in food blogs as a way of chilling out after a hard days work.)
There’s more; read the help files.
Kudos
Product
Overview— An excellent description of the
product function and how termed are defined is provided on Page 4 of the user
manual. Read it, it makes functions such as Navigation, using the Recipe
Browser, crating import/export Templates or Menu Sets easy to understand. Using a Meal Calendar, creating
Shopping (market) lists for a recipe or a meal is straightforward. Enough, I’ve
already discussed Categorizing Recipes and importing recipes or recipe
collections. This is a much under recognized product.
Recipe Linking Function — You can link recipes together two ways: Recipes that complement another
recipe or are required to make the recipe are easy to create. I cheat and
double enter the later category twice — once in the complete all needed
ingredients for cooking a ‘whole meal deal’ and separately for the needed
sauce, salsa or presto.
Recipe Pack Availability — No time for entering your favorite recipes into the CookWare Deluxe?
Collections of recipes are the simple answer! Simply download a recipe
collection of your choice and import delicious recipes into your favorite
recipe book. The two “packs”
contain over 1200 high quality recipes, which not only get you started by actually
provide examples around which you can learn to use and navigate around in CookWare
Deluxe. I do wish that these packs were free, but times are tight all over. You
can always import your own collection of the massive Master Cooks compendia.
I Needed to
Do Surgery on Categories – I needed to make some significant changes to the categories defined in
CWD to bring it into conformance with my own recipe collecting system. The
product provides five category groupings. (See the image in the preceding
section. Until I discovered a faster way to deal with removing categories I was
forced to do so one at a time in a two-step process. First select the item top
be deleted [the right side X in the list window], and then move to the delete
window to do so). Oh my aching wrist. I did find a quicker way of consecutive
single item deletion, — hold down the option key while selecting. I could
discover no way to batch delete my selecting multiple items.
Creating a
New Category — I
would have like to create a new top-level category called cooking methods by
removing them from the existing cookbooks list. I have not been able to figure out how to do so. Why,
I want to separate cooking methods from what I call cuisine specialties. (See Adding/Changing
Categories.)
Conclusions
and Recommendation
This software is
easy to use. The database related
language, recipe mangers are a data based product, is straightforward and easy
to relate to.
If you'd like to
add more recipes to CookWare Deluxe (unlimited numbers can be added,) additional
recipes can found using only a couple clicks by using CWD’s built-in Web Resource
Helper. Mitch, it developer says, “Spend your time cooking recipes not
searching and typing them.” If you need to convert serving sizes or ounces to
liters you can use the built-in conversion helper. I love ex-British empire
sites and they’re mostly metric these days. You can also send a recipe to your
friends via e-mail with just a click. The built-in help especially useful, and
the spell checkers, for two finger typists, makes CookWare Deluxe even easier
for me to use.
You can print
single recipes or a menu, even a small index for quick reference. Maybe you'd
like to put your recipes into a three-ring binder; CookWare Deluxe prints
tab-like descriptions for each recipe so you can easily find them. You can add
details to a recipe such as a photo, notes and much more.
The ability to
find a recipe in CookWare Deluxe is excellent. You can find a recipe by using
any combination of recipe name, course, region, ingredient, rating and more.
(That of course assumes you have added category tags to them. It's simple and
fast!
The under $40
product, the going rate for good easy to use recipe managers, is an acceptable
price for any who want to abandon shoe boxes full of food spilled index cards
or shelves full of books with no master index list of recipes in your dozens to
hundreds or more cookbooks library. What is your time worth? How many hours
will it take to find mother’s polish onion-poppy seed crackers; wherever it’s
hidden.
Despite its ease
of use and well-organized focused and complete help materials, Mitch at Digital
Fried Chicken provides great customer service, answering question promptly and
in a helpful manner. This is a great recipe management tool – try it
— buy it! 4.5 macCs,
why, because I’m a stingy grader who does believe in grading on a curve.
Appendices and Post Scripts
Sources of
Master Cook Recipe Collections (These are the most interesting content rich sites I found when surfing.)
If
you find more good collections, send me a message at hbabad@maccompanion.com
