Cook'n Recipe Organizer Giveaway

The Cook'n Recipe Organizer is super neat!  I had a blast learning my way around the program and deciding what to try first.  Never heard of Cook'n Recipe Organizer?  Cook'n Recipe Organizer is a program designed to make organizing your recipes easier, if you couldn't tell by the name, lol.

This recipe organizer makes finding your recipes so easy!  The hardest part is getting them into the program and even that is a breeze so really there is no hard part.  The only reason I say it is hard is because of the overwhelming amount of recipes I have to put into the organizer.  But luckily it is quick to add recipes that you have on paper.  Cook'n has a bunch of great features that I love and make entering and saving recipes easier than entering them in a regular spreadsheet or word.

First, when when entering recipes manually it has auto-fill for ingredients
and amounts.  For example here are a few examples of when I was entering a brownie recipe.  The first picture below is of a drop down menu for amounts.  Notice I only entered a "t" and it gave me a list of options such as teaspoon, tablespoon, quart, etc.  All I had to do was click on the one I wanted or scroll down to the one I wanted and hit tab and it auto-filled.  In this case I wanted teaspoon and since it was first on the list all I had to do was hit tab.  So entering "teaspoon" only took 2 key strokes rather than 8.  That is quite the decrease.


The picture below shows the drop down for ingredients.  The same principle applies for ingredients as for amounts, it too cuts down on the number of key strokes, thus cutting down on time it takes to enter recipes.



When adding an ingredient to the recipe that is not in the database you will be prompted (as shown below) to add it to the database so it will be there for future use.  That way next time you need to add that ingredient to a recipe it will be in the drop down menu.  However you are not required to add it to the database if you do not wish too.  It really depends on your own choice.


This program does not only make it easier to enter your own recipes but also it makes it super easy to search and add recipes from the Internet.  On the home page you can search the Internet for any recipe you would like just like you would on any other search browser and get the same results you would on any other search engine, if not more.  I searched for "traditional cheesecake" and got a ton of results and all the results were for "traditional cheesecake".  I find with other search engines they tens to add other results in that have nothing to do with what I was looking for but not with the searches from Cook'n.

Once you find the recipe that you would like to make or save from the search you can go tot the top of the screen to where it says "capture" and this will auto fill the entire recipe along with the website you found it at into Cook'n.  The picture from the website too!  Then all you have to do is choose where you want the recipe to be saved, meaning in which recipe book (I will talk about that in a minute).

   

There are so many aspects to this program I need to move on to cover the majority of them.  Another great feature that Cook'n brings to the table is that it comes with a cookbook already downloaded and you can make your own cookbooks.  I created a few cookbooks.  Now this is where I stumbled upon the first problem.  What I found as a problem would not bother most though and it is so small I got over it really quick.  The problem is when you make your cookbook you give it a title, then you add chapters.  Great right?  Well, I got stuck after making my chapters because I wanted to break my chapters into smaller sections.  For example; My title was Jenn's Recipes and my chapters were appetizers, Sauces and marinades, main dishes, sides, desserts, and drinks.  I wanted to break appetizers down into "hot" and "cold", sauces and marinades into "sauces" and "marinades", main dishes into "beef", "chicken", etc but I couldn't because I could only break down as far as chapters.  Like I said it is a small thing and I ended up just making each chapter I had its own cookbook so I could break it up the way I wanted.  Not a big deal just a speed bump in my path.

Once you have recipes in the cookbook or if you want to search the cookbook it came with it is really easy to do as well.   All you do is click the search tab and enter what you are looking for.  Have an idea of what you want but not exactly?  No problem!  Say you have chicken thawed and want to use it for dinner.  Just put "chicken" into the search box and look at the results.  It gets even better though.  If the results are coming up with recipes that require certain ingredients you do not have then you can put those in the search as well but so it does not include recipes with those ingredients.  That way you are not combing through a bunch of recipes that require ingredients your don't have or someone that will be joining you for dinner may be allergic to.

You can also make up custom menus with this software.  You can make menus for a day, week, month, or just a meal if you want.  Super easy to do, just drag and drop the recipes.  One of my favorite features of this program is that it will make a shopping list  for any recipe or menu you want one for.  You can then check off what you have and it will regenerate for what you need.  The shopping list also list items that are generally the cheapest and gives you a general price of what the ingredients will cost.

 
The program also gives nutritional information on any recipe.  Yes, including the ones you have entered into the program.  How cool is that?  I love that because it lets me be more aware of what I am taking in because I find it hard to figure it out on my own, especially when recipes include a ton of ingredients.

There is one more thing I want to bring up that I absolutely love.  That is the fact that I can change the template design of each cookbook.  So if I want to create a cookbook to print and have bound for a gift then I can pick a different template that I choose.  Christmas is coming up so lets look at the Christmas template.

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