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Tag Archives: recipes
The Gannet: Five Spice Pork and Cashews
I have been on a quest to find meals which take 30 minutes or less to prepare. Again – the heat of the British “Summer” and the fact that I’ve been working lots of hours lately just mean I don’t want to be in the kitchen much. This meal is again inspired by Olive magazine (who seem to have come up trumps this month. I don’t rate my presentation much, but the flavour was fantastic. (more…)
Tagged recipes
The Gannet: Warm Salad For A Warm Day
We have been having Summer in London this past week (well, apart from the day where it pelted down). For those of you outside the UK, that means the temperature has climbed all the way up into the 80′s and London has slowed down. It’s not so much that the 80′s is so hot (sorry that’s about 30 Celsius for those of you who have converted to the New Math) but that (a) we’re in the city, and (b) the city has no air conditioning. I think Harrod’s might have air conditioning, but you have to ride on the tube where the temperature is just a few degrees above Hell to get there, so most of us don’t bother.
Warm days of course mean wanting to spend less time in the kitchen, but as we’re cutting down on our takeaways in this house, and we still want to eat, we have to do something. This salad, though it does involve a bit of time near some hot pans, is pretty quick and painless and it was a big hit with Him Indoors, who said “that’s my kind of salad, baby”. Meaning of course that the ratio of green stuff to bacon was acceptable for him. It’s inspired by a recipe from Olive magazine, though I took sufficient liberties so as to feel it’s my intellectual property. (more…)
Tagged recipes
Recipe software for Macs
I have been frustrated recently in my efforts to find the perfect cook's software to run on Mac OS X. My criteria isn't that demanding (so I thought). I have been looking for a programme that:
- Easily imports and categorises recipes.
- Has a menu planning facility.
- Creates shopping lists based on menus.
There seems to be maybe a dozen recipe and menu packages for Mac out there. A few of them do all three of the above. But what I found was there are very few that do it well. This is when I should start to admit that my criteria is, actually, a bit more demanding than I thought. As I've spent so much bloody time trying to find the perfect package, I thought I'd share my research here. Maybe one of you knows of a programme that I haven't found yet. Or maybe this will save you some time and money. I've listed each programme and a list of criteria (demanding – me?) that I used to evaluate them. I actually made a spreadsheet and compared the features and cost of them all. I am my father's daughter, after all!
Mac Gourmet (version 2.1.4)
- Cost: $24.95 /free 20 session trial
- User interface/presentation: 9 out of 10. Great OSX look, customisable with a choice of seven 'skins' and a variety of colours. Chefs view for anyone crazy enough to have a computer in the kitchen.
- Importing/adding new recipes: Easy import wizard integrates with Services menu to make internet import easy, text importer works just as well.
- Adding photo/illustration to recipes: Yes and they are displayed at a decent size.
- Recipe scaling: Yes
- Metric/US switching: Yes
- Dietary information: Space to add your own if you have it.
- Menu Planner: No.
- Shopping List: Yes, but pretty basic. Combines ingredients but doesn't sort them. Takes several steps to add new recipes.
- Notes: I had high hopes for Mac Gourmet because it looks so good and the import wizard is slick, but the lack of a menu planner and the rudimentary shopping list let it down.
Shop N Cook (version 3.4)
- Cost: $49.95/free 45 day trial
- User interface/presentation: 4 out of 10. Looks like a cheap & nasty Windows programme. Amateurish hand-drawn icons and bad layouts.
- Importing/adding new recipes: Import wizard works well from internet or text files.
- Adding photo/illustration to recipes: No drag & drop, you need to have the file saved locally to add to recipes. Display is tiny in the recipe view.
- Recipe scaling: Yes
- Metric/US switching: Yes
- Dietary information: Yes, very accurate automatic calculation of all nutritional values. Impressive.
- Menu planner: Yes, a rather excellent one (combines daily menus nutrition for example) and allows planning months in advance.
- Shopping List: Yes, although the interface is a bit odd (editing involves scrolling through every ingredient available and un-ticking anything you don't want) it works, and it sorts by grocery section (dairy, meat etc)!
- Notes: It's the most expensive, and it looks like crap. Otherwise it does everything you could ask for.
