Need a Helping Hand in the Kitchen?

Who doesn't love a great meal? The Olsen sisters might not, but us regular folks, we usually do. I don't know about you, but I love food. Not to say I live to eat, but the pleasure of tasting fine dishes is something I truly cherish in life. Because I enjoy food so much, I've also developed the habit of cooking (which is not so dreadful as some would make us think it is). Cooking resembles art in a certain degree, when stepping beyond the usual omelet or fries.

If you're not a cooking aficionado or a professional chef, the preparation of a meal could prove to be a challenging task. You wouldn't want to forget some essential ingredient for your salad or overcook the Chinese duck that is bound to impress the girlfriend you've invited over for a home-made romantic dinner.

All this food talk is starting to make me hungry, so I'll cut to the chase. The software I'm going to talk about today is called Yum! and it's one of the many recipe organizers out there and it will not let you down. You just learn to master the art of seasoning the dish, because Yum! will take care of the technicalities. The recipe organizer from will allow you to store all your recipes, no matter how complicated or exotic.

Yum! is a simple Mac OS X application that is easy to install and use, and it comes with a fairly large sample collection of recipes. Both the software and the recipe collection can be downloaded and used free o charge (the producer says it's under UNDER-Ware license - freeware with little limitations, donations are highly appreciated). It's intended for OS 10.4 or later, but versions compatible with Panther and Jaguar are also available.

To organize your recipes, Yum! will let you create food categories, like soups, salads, dressings, deserts and so on. Recipes can be placed in one or several categories, but it is not mandatory. For each recipe, you will write down information such as: the time it takes to prepare, required ingredients, pre-heat temperature, the manner of preparation and so on. You can even note who gave you the recipe, if you would want at some point to credit some relative for the exquisite lasagna recipe you made for a family anniversary.

When writing down a recipe, the program allows you to select between various units and ingredients, from drop-down lists. The software comes with a fairly large list of food units (measurements of amount or volume, like kilograms, pounds, ounces or specific cooking measurements such as table spoons, cups, springs and so on).

An ingredients list containing many of the regular ingredients is also available. You can check on the list the ingredients you have and make a shopping list of those you need. Items can be added to both these lists, so you can customize them to your needs. You can search your recipe collection and the software will display only the recipes that contain the search text.

Printing is something I find to be very important when it comes to recipe organizers. No one places their Apple laptop on the cooking table to check for ingredients or instructions, while frying vegetables. When cooking, one will need a printed copy of the recipe. Yum is printer friendly and allows you to print one or several of your recipes in a clear, simple manner, much UNlike those post-it recipes you have thrown on your kitchen cupboard that you always seem to misplace. You can customize your viewing options and use various fonts, styles and sizes, as you please.

Once you've managed to put up a nice personal database containing the secret paths to your favorite dishes, you'll be able to backup your precious recipes and export you information to various formats (including XML) for further use. You can export a recipe, a category or your whole collection, according to you needs. With the simple use of a menu option, easily email any of your recipes, for your friends or family to enjoy.

There is another great feature about Yum! I haven't written about because I payed little attention to pasting a recipe copied from an exterior source. Yum has the great ability of parsing the pasted text and breaking it all up in the various components and format it into the ingredients table automatically.

The Good

Yum is a good recipe organizer. It probably will not leave you breathless, it's not something I would call impressive, but it works fine and should suit most of your needs. The interface is nice and clean, very easy to use and it seems to me that the producer has put a lot of work in the development of this software, even though it's available for free.

The Bad

There was nothing I specifically did not like, Yum is just fine for a freeware utility. It could have allowed the adding of more information for recipes (such as nutrition values, an image perhaps), but simplicity is one of Yum's strong points, so I don't necessarily see this as a flaw.

The Truth

Simple, easy to use and free. Yum is a good choice if you were looking for a recipe organizer and didn't plan to spend much on it. Nothing impressive, but gets the job done.

These are the screenshots: