Now Youre Cooking 5.93

Overview

If cooking is your hobby and you think of it as a stress busting activity then undoubtedly you must be having tons of recipes collected from various sources such as from magazines, websites, TV programs, and even your friends. However, you must also be having a hard time to manage all these recipes as cuttings, writings or web page bookmarks, and then trying to hunt down these not-so-accessible recipe collections whenever you want to cook something new. Fortunately, there is “Now You’re Cooking!” (NYC) application for people like you which lets you manage all the recipes in one place and even has a database of its own having hundreds of pre-defined recipes. This versatile applications’ capabilities do not end here, as it helps organize meal plans, check out new coupons, analyze nutrition of each food item, helps create Fitness Calculator based on your personal info, add shopping list, and much more. Furthermore, you can simply import recipe images or complete recipes from web pages and even publish your own recipes to different websites or MS word.

Installation

The installation steps are very generic and ask you to confirm details like setup installation location, Start Menu folder name (for setup’s shortcut), and addition of Desktop icon. Lastly, you can choose the option to launch the application right away or later on. When the application is run for the first time, its nutrition database is created which should not be interrupted. This application is designed to work with following OS: Windows XP/Vista/7/8.

Interface

A pleasant and intuitive interface is lacking in this application; although slowly and gradually, you will get used to its working but at the first sight it might fail to impress you. In fact, you would expect that an application like this would have a bright and colorful interface but instead it has a bland look. Anyhow, all its main functions are shown with icons in the main title bar including – Recipes, Menu, Shop List, List By Aisle, List Cost, Coupons, Nutrition, Glossary, and Fitness. Clicking on any one of these functions will open up a new window to view, create or edit the information (of the clicked function). The operations that can be performed on aforementioned functions are also aligned in the title bar (below functions) and which are – zip cookbooks, delete cookbooks, import/export recipes, open text editor, edit cookbook categories, and so on.

Pros

• “Now You’re cooking!” application has a huge collection of recipes and menus stored in its USDA SR27 database. These example recipes are given under different categories,  such as for breakfast, beverages, desserts, Indian recipes, soups/stews, and many more
• You can take printouts for any recipe, rate it, change its category, view the image for a recipe (in case you don’t recognize it by name), and even send it via email to a friend
• No need to save bookmarks for web pages, collect magazine cut outs, or note down a new recipe you have learned or tried recently; simply add it in this application. You can add the quantity, unit, description, directions, and categories for any recipes in such a way, that you won’t miss out any details the next time you make the same recipe
• Find it difficult to decide on what to make for breakfast, lunch or dinner every day? Now pre-plan and save your menu for separate meals i.e. for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks for different days, which you can view later on
• Shopping list is a very useful feature that helps you in reminding and listing down all the items that you are suppose to buy on your next shopping trip
• With ‘List By Aisle’ feature, you can even view the aisle of the store from where the item will be available and the item’s price as well, which saves you from the hassle of roaming around in the store and even compare its price with other stores
• It even helps you in cutting down your shopping expenses as with  NYC’s coupon database , you can check for coupons available for any items included in your shopping list
• Its nutrition database having 8618 items lets you check nutrition details about each food item including its calories, potassium, total fat, protein, cholesterol, alcohol, sugars, and much more. This way you know which item is healthy (or not) for you and your family
• If you want to start a balanced diet plan, then this application’s in-built ‘Fitness Calculator’ can guide you with that. You simply need to enter your personal info like age, gender, exercise time, height, weight, waist, calories, body fat, and so on, and the application will calculate how much workout you need to do

Cons

• Interface could be improved

Alternatives

Mi Recetario is an amazing kitchen recipe manager that lets you add and manage your recipes, download recipes from websites and even export them in various formats such as JPG, BMP, TIF, and HTM. Recipe Cookbook is another recipe software that has over pre-defined 2,000 recipes from different sources and even lets you add your own recipes.

Conclusion

“Now You’re Cooking” is a wonderful application with a simple motive to help out people who love to cook and want to increase their recipe collection day-by-day. Apart from storing numerous recipes, it also helps you with your grocery shopping, nutrition intake, and even chalking down fitness plans for you. We recommend this application to all cooking specialists.