There are a number of recipe apps out there. Some let you add a recipe from a limited list of websites with the push of a button. Some feed you thousands of online recipes. Some recipe apps provide nutritional information where they can – as long as the ingredients, their quantities and units of measure are input in a way that can be recognized by the nutritional information database.  Others offer Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which in my experience is rarely 100% accurate or one-step.

These features can come with a cost – whether it’s clutter, unreliability or complexity sometimes leading to software errors.

This recipe software isn’t that.  But it is what most people need – a simple, reliable and inexpensive recipe organizer that allows you to quickly input your own recipes from anywhere to your PC, find them in an instant whenever you need them and output them singly or in groups in an organized format for access wherever you want them.

By simple, I mean that the ribbon navigation provides a clean interface to all of the system features and that the tabbed recipe entry forms keep you from being overwhelmed by individual recipe clutter.

By reliable, I mean that you can get pretty much any recipe from anywhere by yourself, without needing your software to have a particular site listed.  Without the software failing.  It’s usually a simple copy and paste of the text and then edits as you want. I like to think of it as teaching someone to fish instead of supplying a limited variety of fish.  It’s really pretty simple.

And inexpensive?  It’s a one time fee of $19.99.  You won’t see ads.  You won’t pay for a subscription.  And you can access your full recipe PDF on any other devices without any additional cost.  Updates are free.

This software is for your own recipes – the ones you have cultivated, are tinkering with, have perfected, served to guests – your go to recipes. It’s for those recipes that let you recreate your mom’s Christmas dinners or the online ones that you tried, loved and want to make sure you don’t lose track of.

Although you can keep tens of thousands of recipes in The Recipe System, any application in which you have tens of thousands of recipes in is going to make it harder to find the ones you actually care about.  In my view it’s about quality not quantity.

And a few more reasons…

You can save a tremendous amount of information for any given recipe.  The large text fields like directions, history and other nutritional information can each hold about 24 standard size pages of information. And you can add an unlimited number of attachments like images, videos, shopping links for hard to find utensils, or the original URL where you got the recipe.

Unless you really want to, you don’t have to wade through tens of thousands of recipes that aren’t yours, recipes that you will likely never use and that you have no feel for or connection to.

You don’t have to enter ingredients separately if it’s not your style.  You can copy and paste entire recipes into the directions field (except pictures which will go somewhere else).  Adding separate ingredients allows for a few options like a structured format when viewing the recipe and for multi ingredient searches on those recipes that use the feature.  You might not like the way the recipe looks with that format though, so you don’t have to use it.  All recipes get output in a cookbook style but you have a high degree of control over how they look.

It’s really no rules recipe entry – except for adding a recipe title there are no other requirements.  There is no need to commit time to a recipe unless you are sure it’s worth it.

And lastly, because I use The Recipe System almost every day, I make sure it works!