If you have ever fancied publishing your own recipe book to beat the likes of Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver at their own game, then you might well be interested to know a little bit more about MacGourmet – a new piece of software being promoted as being 'like iTunes for your recipes'.
Of course, it's easy to get access to millions of recipes online via a quick Google search and, yes, we're getting kind of sick of stuff being lazily described as 'the iTunes of X', yet at the same time we have to admit to a need to find a useful way of building up our own database of recipes we like and want to share with our mates and family members.
Which is potentially where MacGourmet comes in, with its tantalising offer to solve our kitchen-based dilemmas and "bring our recipe collection into the 21st century."
iCooking on gas
"MacGourmet helps you create and edit your recipes, wine notes and cooking notes, easily browse your entire collection and build your own custom lists for categories like appetizers or desserts," reads the site blurb and the software claims to have been the first Mac recipe application to include publishing, clipping from web pages, web site importing, as well as nutritional analysis, meal planning, and – by far the coolest feature of all – the option to build real hardback cookbooks of your very own, to show off to your mates at dinner parties.
MacGourmet works in tandem with TasteBook, which is itself described as "the best place on the web to discover, organize and share favorite recipes and turn them into personal hardcover cookbooks."
Another one of the handy features of the software is the 'shopping list export' to your PDA or iPod, so you can make sure you get the most out of every trip to your local organic butcher or grocer (or, back in the real world, finally stick to your guns and stop buying all of that processed muck from your local Tesco or Somerfields!).
MacGourmet is available online for download as a free demo and the full version of MacGourmet 2.3 costs $24.95
