Gourmet Recipe Manager 0.12.2 review
DownloadGourmet Recipe Manager is a simple but powerful recipe-managing application
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Gourmet Recipe Manager is a simple but powerful recipe-managing application. Gourmet is intended for the GNOME desktop environment, but works on any platform that gtk supports, including windows.
Gourmet allows you to collect, search and organize your recipes, and to automatically generate shopping lists from your collection. Take a look at the screenshots for a sense of how this works.
Gourmet Recipe Manager is free software. If you want to contribute to the project and you're a python programmer, please take a look at the source code and start hacking! If you would like to use Gourmet in a language other than English, you can help translate gourmet using the rosetta web-based tool.
Simple Search
Screenshot of Search viewA simple index view allows you to look at all your recipes as a list and quickly search through them by ingredient, title, category, cuisine, rating, or instructions. Searching happens as you type to save you keystrokes, and multiple kinds of searches can easily be combined from this same view (so you can search for salads (category) with walnuts (ingredient) without having to open a separate dialog. You can easily sort recipes by clicking on the column you'd like to sort by. Furthermore, for advanced users, you can search using regular expressions.
Recipe Editor
Screenshot of Search viewA recipe card view allows editing and entering individual recipes easily. It also instantly multiplies ingredient amounts if you need to multiply or divide a recipe, and even adjusts units to keep them as readable as possible (so that 2 tbs. x 4 displays as 1/2 cup). Gourmet aims to make entering ingredients as intuitive and painless as possible, while still allowing for powerful features. Features include:
A keyed ingredient list which allows searches and shopping-list generation to understand synonyms (like aubergine and eggplant) and ignore ingredient descriptions (i.e. to treat "tomatoes, finely chopped" as "tomatoes" for the purpose of searching and generating shopping lists.
An intuitive spreadsheet-like editing interface
An alternative, fast form-like ingredient entering interface (which allows you to easily type ingredient lists without looking at the screen.
Drag-n-drop support for importing ingredient lists from your web browser or other application.
Support for pasting ingredient lists in from your clipboard.
Support for grouping ingredients within a recipe.
Support for calling another recipe as an ingredient.(Note: this allows you to use a recipe as a menu!)
Support for optional ingredients.
In addition to ingredients and instructions, you can enter information about categories, cuisines, and ratings that you can later use to search for recipes. In each case, Gourmet allows you a drop down menu of standard categories and categories you've used in the past, but also allows you to enter any custom categories you like.
You can also add images to your recipe for an attractive display. Thumbnails will be displayed in the recipe index. Currently, only HTML export supports images.
Import and Export
Gourmet includes simple and powerful import and export filters for a number of formats, including the two most common recipe formats on the web (mealmaster and mastercook).
Gourmet can import the following kinds of files:
Mealmaster Files
MasterCook text files
MasterCook XML files
Gourmet XML files
A number of popular recipe websites, such as epicurious and recipezaar
Gourmet also can import ingredient lists from a regular plain text list, which can be imported from a file, pasted from the clipboard or dragged onto the editing view.
Gourmet can export the following kinds of files:
Mealmaster files
Rich Text Format
Plain Text
Recipe Web Pages
Gourmet XML files
On GNU/Linux systems, gourmet can also export PDF or postscript files via its printing interface.
Gourmet aims to import and export as many common formats as possible. If you have a format you'd like to import, please submit a feature request, or, if you're a programmer, go ahead and start writing the filter yourself!
Shopping List Manager
Screenshot of Shopping List ViewGourmet allows you to automatically generate shopping list from your recipes. You can easily multiply recipes when you add them to adjust for the number of people you're cooking for. If the units are convertable, different units used in different recipes will be added up correctly on your shoppings list (Gourmet even knows the density of some common foods to allow volume-to-weight conversions!). If Gourmet can't convert your units, the shopping list will simply display both units -- for example, the screenshot shows both tsp. and cloves of garlic, since these units can't be sensibly combined.
If you already have an item that appears on your shopping list, you can drag it into your "pantry" so it won't be included! Items added to your pantry will be remembered in the future (so you don't have to manually remove items like "water" from your shopping list every time a recipe calls for it). However, since the pantry list is shown next to the shopping list, you will always have a list at hand of all the ingredients called for by your recipes. (You can drag an item back from the pantry to the shopping list if you've run out.)
The shopping list is also automatically sorted into categories. Gourmet knows the basic categories of a number of foods (produce, meat, fish), and you can create whatever categories are convenient for your own shopping -- I use it for sorting out the basic sections and aisles of my local grocery store and those items that I get from specialty stores. You can set up shopping categories as you enter recipes, or you can move ingredients around within the shopping list view by drag and dropping or using a popup menu.
Here are some key features of "Gourmet Recipe Manager":
Simple searching and sorting
Easy recipe editing
Import and export from various formats
A shopping list creator and organizer
What's New in This Release:
This release fixes a minor bug in mealmaster import and another in ingredient search.
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