ShopNCook Menu for Windows and Mac
Shop’NCook Menu is two applications in one, a meal planner and a shopping list manager working seamlessly together to facilitate your grocery shopping and cooking. Recipes are easily added by typing them in, pasting them from the clipboard, or importing directly from the internet: no formatting is necessary. The smart wizard interprets the recipes, links them to the database of grocery items or to other recipes and yields an accurate nutritional analysis without user’s intervention. You organize your recipes by categories and in cookbooks that you can share with anyone with the free Shop’NCook Reader software. A powerful scaling tool lets you scale the ingredients and the text of your recipes, make ingredient substitutions and unit conversions. You plan your meals by dragging recipes on days of a calendar: the recipes are automatically scaled to match the number of servings of the meal. A day can be divided in as many meals as you wish. You can add selectively to the shopping list the ingredients for several days or weeks of meals at a time with a single click of the mouse. The ingredient quantities are aggregated and converted to your preferred shopping units. Contrary to most cooking software, grocery lists can also be created by directly selecting items of the database, adding from sublists or just typing in new items. Other features: fully customizable database of more than 2000 grocery items with nutritional data for more than 40 nutrients; recipe import in several popular formats (scx, mm, mxp, mx2 and plain text); pictures can be added to recipes; nutrition scripts to control the display of nutritional information and compute custom nutritional formulas; e-mail tool to send recipes and shopping lists; direct access to an online recipe database where Shop’NCook users share their recipes. The CD contains the installers for Windows and Mac OS X platforms. The installers include three cookbooks totaling about 1000 recipes.
User Ratings and Reviews
4 Stars Great Cooking and Shopping Aid
I’ve only had this software for about a month, but so far I’m finding it VERY useful. You can add your own recipes or get recipes from their extensive online database. It will also allow you to import recipes from other programs.
The two things I have found most useful are the shopping list and nutritional analysis features. My husband is diabetic, so we have to count carbs, and this program allows me to put in my own recipes and calculates the nutritional information for the recipes. The nutritional analysis is based on information from the USDA National Nutrient Database, and the program also lets you add your own items in (this is useful if you want to add something like a pre-made pasta sauce for example). While it is possible to find a lot of this nutional information online for free (at the USDA website or calorieking.com), that can be a real hassle because you have to look up each ingredient and manually make the calculation, where this program does the calculations for you once you enter in the ingredients. In addition to the standard nutrients (fat, calories, protein, carbs, etc…), this program will give you a full analysis including various vitamins, caffeine, and phytosterols. You can also customize what nutritional information is displayed if you are only interested in certain ones.
The Shopping List feature is awesome. You can basically add all of your recipes for the week to the shopping list, and it will create a list of all the items you need sorted by store aisle/section – this is a HUGE time saver!
My only 2 complaints about the software are:
(1) It seems you have to enter the ingredients quantities under the recipe and then again under the “ingredients” tab (which it uses for the nutritional analysis). When you add the items in the “ingredients” list, they show up on the “recipe” page as well, but their quantities show up blank and then you have to re-enter them (or usually I just leave them blank, but this could be a nuisance if you were wanting to share the recipe with others….)
(2) The graphical user-interface for the program is a bit clunky. It is functional, but it certainly isn’t nice to look at it, and is not necessarily intuitive. However, the help files are good, and it doesn’t take too long to figure out how things work. I also like the fact that so many things in the program are customizable.
Overall, the program is definitely worth the money just for the shopping list and nutritional analysis features alone. I haven’t actually tried using any of the recipes that come with the program yet, but some of them look like they’d be good.
5 Stars The BEST Recipe Software for MAC — It does it all!!
I have researched and downloaded many recipe programs but they were missing some part I needed or were just not comfortable to use. I finally ran across Shop’NCook Menu and it is GREAT! You can just record recipes and create shopping lists OR you can have it handle it all!!! AND it is fun to use. You can create cookbooks, add photos if you want, you can copy recipes from places like the Food Network and paste into the program and it puts everything in place for you like magic. YOU CAN ALSO IMPORT recipes you have from Meal-Master, MasterCook and other popular formats It automatically calculates nutritional information for each recipe you enter. You can search, create/print recipes, create menus (there is a calendar built in to help you) and aisle-by-aisle shopping lists. It has the ability to scale down your recipes. You can even download over 1,000 recipes into the program from their website. Best part is that it only cost $59.95. It is a bargain. Also, did I mention that you can export shopping lists to SplashShopper format for use in your PDA so you can take your lists to the store as printed sheets or in your Palm.
They offer 3 versions — Shop’NCook HOME, Shop’NCook MENU and Shop’NCook PRO which is for foodservice operations and has extra functions for calculating the cost of food preparation.
[...]
Buy/More Info
