I love to cook. I do 85% of the cooking in our house and create, test, alter and enjoy all types of recipes. My cabinet is full of cookbooks and three binders full of recipes I have printed out, torn from magazines or handwritten in the hopes of trying one day. It was a fine system, or so I thought.

One day, my wife was looking through a magazine and came across an advertisement for a program that creates a recipe database. Ever the organizer, she recommended I check it out to tame the madness that is my recipe cabinet. I did, but found it was only for PC’s. I thought, “There has to be something like this for Mac, right?”

I was not disappointed. Turns out there are several Mac-compatible programs out there.  I downloaded a demo of MacGourmet onto my MacBook Pro, tried it for a few days and—wow! It wasn’t long before I purchased the software (a mere $25) and was adding, searching and importing recipes.

My first order of business has been to enter all the handwritten, faded, food-stained recipes I have stored in my binders. These are the recipes passed on from relatives that are irreplaceable, at least to a foodie like me.

A great feature of the software is the “Chef View,” an enlarged window with black and white text of the recipe in a large enough font that even my 75 yr old aunt Lois can read (she makes a darn good chicken parmesan). I take my MacBook Pro into the kitchen, open the recipe software and start cooking without the worry of spilling on my cookbook or measuring incorrectly because I can’t read the smudged type of a recipe I printed out years ago.

My Mac is not only a vehicle for audio entertainment, games, e-mail and web surfing. It is now an integral part of my family’s meals. All I have to do is back-up my laptop’s hard drive on my Mercury Elite-AL external hard drive (plus a quarterly back up to another drive I keep off site, just in case) and I no longer fear losing all the hard work and recipes I’ve collected. Article Continues…