LARCENOUS I'll start up-front by saying that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a professional cook. That said, I DO love to cook, and as my wife and I age, it's increasingly important to keep track of what we eat, too, which is not always as easy as just remembering "oh yeah, a 'serving' of pasta primavera." What IS that serving? How many calories, how much fat, carbs, etc? Many cookbooks or online recipes will give you nutrition information these days, but what about your aunt Phyllis' recipe for pancakes that you've loved since you were a kid, and you still have on a 3x5 card in the kitchen in her handwriting? Well, with TRM, worry no more: if you are willing to take the time, there is an incredibly useful feature which allows you to use a searchable database of food nutrition values and find out the total nutritional value per serving (and you get to determine "serving" size) of every recipe you possess. If you are on some oddball diet that makes you count every last calorie you take in, you can do that with TRM, while STILL using your OWN recipes! But that's only ONE of the multitude of great features in TRM. I know that, short of day-planner software, cooking software is probably the most individual and personal thing you do on your computer. Every person likes his/her recipe software laid out a little differently, with different features. So this may not be for everyone...but after having tried some of the others, I have to say it's hard to imagine those for whom this app doesn't "feel right" being a very LARGE crowd. Simply put, TRM has been done VERY well. You can group your recipes into "meals" - and then export the ingredient lists to a shopping list with one click. You can also mark some of the items (such as, say, two tablespoons of olive oil for sauteeing) as "purchased," meaning they're staples you already have around the house and don't need to buy every time you do that particular recipe. Conversely, you can add non-recipe items to the shopping list as "pantry" items - to re-stock things you've run out of, or new ingredients. And, of course, you can make new recipes. Not that you'd need to for a while, because TRM comes stocked with over 700 recipes (most of them meat-based, but that's because they're geared toward dinners, as opposed to breakfasts, lunches or snacks). The pre-loaded recipes (though I've by no means tried them all) seem to be pretty high-quality, too. There are tabs in each recipe for a photo of the food (not critical, but nice to have, and not difficult if the recipe you're inputting comes from a website which already has a shot of the dish - just drag and drop), ingredients, variations, instructions, nutrition information, pretty much anything you could want regarding a given recipe. For the truly obsessive, there's even a way to lay out the floorplan (no kidding!) of your favorite food stores, so that you can avoid wasting time going from produce to meats to dairy to frozen goods and back again. Like I said, that particular level of detail is a bit much for me personally....but it's nice to know it's there if I ever DO decide I want it. Yet despite its astonishing depth of features, because of tabbing, it doesn't feel bloated or unwieldy - at least not to me. Like I said, YOUR mileage may vary....but like I also said, this app is good enough that at the very least, it should be on your short list if you're auditioning recipe software, and I'm betting many people will find it an absolute joy, as I do.
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