ChickenPing Portable

Food is one of the things that keeps us alive but it doesn't mean we must live to eat, more like the other way around. In a way, food is art and it takes a lot of skill and practice to prepare a good-looking, edible dish. For both personal and business related kitchens, applications like ChickenPing Portable are amongst the first assistants you might want to keep around to store and share recipes.

As the name suggests, you can take and use this edition of ChickenPing wherever you go, given there's a computer to plug the USB Flash drive into. The only thing you need to worry about is whether or not the host PC is equipped with .NET Framework since it's built on this platform.

The application stores all info in a database, for which you're asked to choose a default destination, as well as whether or not you want to fill it with a few presets. This comes in handy for quickly getting acquainted with the many features put at your disposal.

Three major areas can be managed, namely recipes, wines and cocktails. Constantly displayed is a category manager, with the help of which you can easily filter items. Presets you work with seem to cover pretty much everything, ranging from baked snack, breakfast and desserts to raw foods, drinks and beverages, and even several with which to keep a diet.

Recipes are neatly displayed in a list with corresponding icons, full name, rating, description, year, region, country, price and more. Each selection unveils its content in a separate panel. You can insert any bit of detail there is to know, with descriptions cleverly arranged, even the possibility to add pictures, or a “goes well with” tab for more suggestions.

Needless to say that ingredients are also shown along with quantity and method of preparation. If you notice on the last minute you're missing something, it can be added to a shopping list, but export is only limited to printing.

Ingredients can be added to a database. It comes in the form of a “Fridge” feature that gets filled or emptied out according to your management and usage. Combine it with the built-in meal planner and you're sure to know just when you need to head out to the store again.

The same goes for wines and cocktails, with most differences consisting of visuals and some dedicated fields, since beverages are prepared differently. Similar to the fridge, there's a cellar manager cleverly equipped both with the possibility to define custom bottle layouts, as well as their type and content.

If your computer is connected to the Internet you get to benefit from quick and reliable sources of documentation. Built-in dictionaries make sure you know just what every ingredient is, while more flexibility is provided by the restaurant search tool, or possibility to share recipes via mail or through the application's online services.

ChickenPing Portable hides a lot more goodies under the hood, which is sure to raise your appetite simply by snooping through its set of features. The created database holds fields for all you need, while the amount and depth of customization options let you add all there is to know about new, existing or even recipes passed along for generations to share with others.