I am not a cook.  My idea of a good meal is a plate full of cheese nachos, preferably served with Pace™ picante sauce and a Shiner Bock.  My wife Elexia, however, loves cooking.  As of this review she has 36 cookbooks, so when I told her about Pocket Recipes, she couldn't wait for me to get it.

Desktop Conduit

The installation CD that comes with Pocket Recipes installs a Pocket Recipes conduit onto your PC.  Unfortunately, there is no Mac conduit at this time.  Installation was staightforward and creates a Pocket Recipes application on your Windows PC.

I felt that the Windows application is nothing to write home about and that it isn't very user friendly, referring to recipes as "records" and  prompting to save changes even when you don't make any.  My wife, however, informed me that I knew nothing about cooking and was completely wrong.

According to her, using the application to enter in the information is a breeze, and the fields for entering in ingredients and instrucions were obviously planned out by someone who does a lot of cooking.  There is an Import Clipboard feature that you can use when copying recipes from the Internet; however, this was very cumbersome, and I ended up just copying and pasting in text from external recipes.

My wife, of course, thought this was scandalous, as she has an entire mental database of personal recipes which she simply typed in -- apparently, for people who already know a lot of recipes and just need a repository for them, this program is wonderful.  For everyone besides my Elexia and Julia Child, importing recipes can be time consuming.  (Obviously, the trick here is to "allow" someone who has a mental list of recipes to put them on your database . . . )

Here are the fields you can utilize for each recipe:

Unfortunately, for those people who are health conscious, there aren't any fields to enter in calorie counts, fat grams, sugar and salt, etc.  This information can be entered into the "Notes" field, but if you are extremely concerned with nutrition, this one little field will have to hold a lot of information.

There are also built-in categories for your recipes.  I'm no cook, but it seems that all the basic categories are here:

Next to inputing recipes, printing is probably the feature you will use most on the desktop application.  You can print the entire database, the current category, or individual recipes.  There are over fifteen different styles of printing recipes, so you could also print out your recipes and keep them in a more traditional cookbook or a recipe box.  Of course, you can also search for recipes, add a recipe to your shopping list, etc.

Using the Module >>