Cook'n Software Review and Giveaway

If you are reading this review, you have probably heard of the Cook'n software program and you are trying to find out more about it. I had seen it on a few blogs before I was presented with the opportunity to review it myself. Thanks to Mom Blog Society, I received a full copy of the Cook'n Recipe Organizer and have been playing around with it all week. I have to say that I am very impressed with it. If you have any kind of programming background, you can see that it is a very nicely laid out database program that allows you to create your own organization as well as use their own existing structure. This is of course the PRIMARY reason most people are interested in Cook'n. I know that's why I was. Let me give you a simple idea of how most of my recipes look:

This is just the first handful of recipes I grabbed. I am a very organized person, but recipes seem to be the one area where I collect faster than I can write them down in my book. In comes the Cook'n recipe software. I am working on putting all of my recipes into this application and eliminating the stacks of paper. I have put in quite a few, but it is still a little time consuming (only because I have too many).



It is pretty amazing though how simple it really is to do this. You can add recipes to the existing DVO.com cookbook if you really want to only have one cookbook, but if not, you can create multiple cookbooks. If you collect cookbooks (like me or my mom), you can create a separate book for each one. That way if you refer to your recipes by the cookbook it is in, you can still find that exact recipe in that exact cookbook. One thing that I did not see if you could do, but would be really cool, is if you own a cookbook and have a camera, maybe scan the barcode and import all the recipes in that cookbook. That would be pretty cool...Maybe someone will be able to tell me if that is possible or not.

Otherwise, with the Cookbook Library selected, you just hit the little plus button on the Cook'n Bookshelf sidebar and put in a new cookbook.

After you have your cookbook, there are a couple of ways for you to add new chapters. First select your cookbook in the sidebar, and hit the same plus on the Cook'n Bookshelf sidebar. Second, right click on the name of your cookbook, and choose New Chapter. Name the chapters after chapters in your paper cookbooks or give them names that make more sense to you. You can give each chapter a description if you want. You can add all the chapters right away or add them as you need them.

The part that requires the most work is adding a recipe, but that's only because you have to put in more than a name. ;-P You can add recipes in the same way as chapters. Select the chapter you want to put the recipe in and hit the green plus on top of the Cook'n Bookshelf sidebar or right click on the chapter and select "New Recipe." You have a third option as well. At the top of the screen is a button that says "New Recipe." You can click the button at the top at any time without worrying what cookbook or chapter you have selected because when the new recipe opens, you can select the cookbook you want to put the recipe in and the chapter.

Putting in the recipe is simple. You simple click in the first box under Qty for quantity and put in the quantity of your first ingredient. You just hit tab or use your mouse/arrow keys to move to the next field. In many circumstances, what you want to put in is already stored in the software. If you want to put in a measurement of cup, type the letter "c" and the measurements starting with "c" appear. Keep typing until the one you want is at the top of the list or use your mouse to select it. Hit tab to move on. This is the same with ingredients. Lots of ingredients are pre-stored. Many of my appetizer recipes called for cream cheese. That was in there. One of the neat things about ingredients is how you can pull up even two word or three word names of ingredients with very little typing. I can type "cr ch" to get cream cheese. Once you get the first few letters of the first word you can hit space to get to the second word. The first word is not forgotten but remains as all words starting with "cr" in my situation. It just starts looking at the second word for words starting with "ch." Pretty neat! That is one feature I have NEVER seen before in any software. It makes putting in information VERY simple. Another really neat feature is if your ingredient is not in the list, you can type it all out and it will ask if you want to add the ingredient to the list for future recipes. I hit "Quick add" every time (unless I misspelled the ingredient) so that I do not have to type it in every time. If your ingredient has to be from a particular brand, you can add that as well in the brand column. I had a little difficulty with this though. I would "Quick Add" a brand for one line and then the brand would not be available for other ingredients. I think this is ingredient specific, but I tried to add Ritz crackers on two different recipes and I had to add the brand Ritz both times. I have a feeling I am doing something wrong there though.

There is one more item that I am absolutely thrilled about with this software before I get to the giveaway. It has the option to "Capture" recipes from the web. While you are in the software, you can do a search from their home screen and it will pull up website listings with recipes matching your search (just like a search engine). I am always in the mood for good butter cream icing. LOVE IT! Of course that's why I need the elliptical machine I reviewed last week. ;-P I type in what I want and hit enter. Then I get my list of sites that I have to click on until I find the recipe I want to put in my cookbook.

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After I find a good recipe, I simply hit the nice "Capture" button at the top of the screen. The software does all the work sifting through all the other junk on the page (as you can see in the third image in the series above) to get to the recipe (seen in the image directly above this text)information.

The result looks like this:

Pretty awesome huh? Well Let's leave this review to say that this software is pretty great. Do you have a blog that you list recipes on? Well you can even search for that blog's name and try to capture those recipes too! No copy and paste. No retyping. Awesome.

You can also join the Cook'n Club for other special values and freebies ($9.95 a month). Want to know what you get for joining the club? Here's a detailed list. Free Cook'n Download (a $39 value!) Cook'n Forum Recipe Exchange HomeCook'n Weekly Newsletter HomeCook'n Monthly Archive 5 Day Meal Plans Free Product Give-Away Priority Tech Support

Buy Cook'n Recipe Organizer - You can purchase this software at http://www.dvo.com. You can also purchase cookbooks to add into the software through http://www.dvo.com/cookbooks.php. As a bonus to my readers, I am able to offer you a 50% discount code when you purchase the software. At check out just enter the code mb-identity (I recommend you copy and paste the code so you avoid typos).

Want to win a copy of this great software for yourself? Of course you do! You wouldn't have read this entire review if you didn't want it. So here's your chance!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

REMEMBER, you can get 50% off your purchase of the Cook'n software when you use the code mb-identity

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I received one or more of the products mentioned above for free using Mom Blog Society. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers. (http://momblogsociety.com)