Recipe Software Recommendation Provided - RV-Dreams Community Forum

Lynn and Ed · RV-Dreams Family Member

Recipe Software Recommendation Provided

Ckerr · RV-Dreams Family Member

Ditto! I love Living Cookbook. Their tech support is also great. I've had change computers 3 times since I bought it and every time I just call and they give me a new install code.

Besides making recipes easier to find / scale up or down, it also allows you put a picture and you can easily create a nicely formatted cookbook out of your recipes. I'm thinking of doing that for my niece who is getting married next fall.

NWescapee · RV-Dreams Family Member

So, if I have some recipes I've scanned, others that are bookmarked "favorites", will it capture all of these? How does it interact with any cookbooks where we've purchased the Kindle edition?

I'm trying to get organized with recipes and at our old house we had an entire bookshelf FULL of cookbooks. Those have all now been donated, with favorite recipes scanned first, other than this 5-7 cookbooks we decided to bring along. Since then we've purchased several Kindle books and I have tons of bookmarked recipes. Love the idea of getting everything organized.

Ckerr · RV-Dreams Family Member

If I remember correctly you can basically insert a link for the bookmarked recipes. Or alternatively, what I usually do is copy the recipe and paste it into Living Cookbook. What you do is paste it in a text box and then label the parts of the recipe -- ingredients, directions, servings, source, etc. Sometimes it took a little clean up, but it helped refresh my memory about recipes doing it this way.

For the scanned recipes you might want to purchase a software program that converts the scanned doc to a text doc that is editable. I can't think what they are called right now, but they are not too expensive. Once it's a text doc you can do the copy and paste exercise. It really doesn't take too long to make all the recipes look great and easily found.

One of the advantages of actually converting all the recipes to Living Cookbook is that you can easily scan them to serve more or less and you can easily create a shopping list including multiple recipes. Nice when you love to cook and try new things.

There are certainly cheaper ways to go, but for someone who loves cookbooks like you and I do, I think it's worth the investment of both time and money.

Terry and Jo · RV-Dreams Family Member

Carol,

I'm not really fluent with scanners, but is that feature called OCR (Optical Character Recognition) that allows one to scan an image into editable text?

Terry

Lynn and Ed · RV-Dreams Family Member

Ckerr wrote:
.. what I usually do is copy the recipe and paste it into Living Cookbook. What you do is paste it in a text box and then label the parts of the recipe -- ingredients, directions, servings, source, etc. ..

I have used the above approach, which is easy. Additionally, I have found that many of my online recipes were available via the "one-click download" from Living Cookbook's Internet navigator -- in other words, in one-click relevant information is automatically populated into the correct categories (e.g., ingredients, directions, servings) with no/minimal clean up needed.

If you think you might have an interest, I would suggest leveraging their 30-day free trial (that link is in my initial post).

Regarding Kindle cookbooks, I do not plan to include my Kindle cookbook recipes within the software. I might rethink that if I decide to use the software's shopping list and calendar planning functionality. However, I have unfortunately found that many of our cookbooks are not available electronically, so I will scan/capture some recipes from those cookbooks within my Living Cookbook.

-- Edited by Lyn on Sunday 11th of August 2013 09:17:59 AM