A Nice and Handy Recipes Organizer

Are you in the New Year's Eve preparation fever already? Do you have a lot of guests and you haven't decided yet what to cook to impress? You don't  have a lot of time to think of this and to do the shopping either, do you? Well, don't panic!

There are smart tools on the net that might tremendously simplify your life and help you organize your work, so that you don't get overwhelmed with anxiety and stress but fully enjoy the pleasure of having friends invited to dinner.   Organized Gourmet doesn't promise you miracles, but it offers you a well-categorized collection of exquisite and easy-to-prepare recipes and, in addition, it shows you how you can efficiently summarize the ingredients list, so that you never forget a thing and get your work done in due time.  

The Looks

The main window of the application displays three-panels: on the left side, you can see the recipes directory, organized by categories; in the middle, the recipes by name and ratings and at the right, the detailed cooking instructions for any highlighted recipe from the middle panel.

By default, there are five main categories: Breads, Breakfast, Desserts, Dinner and Lunch. Additionally, there is an extra category with the top rated recipes and a general folder that includes all recipes.

The second panel is even more self-explanatory, as it lets you find out with a single look, how the final result should look like, how much time you need to prepare it and how difficult it is to prepare it.

More exactly, in the second panel you can see a yummy screenshot, the name of the recipes with few hints about the ingredients plus the difficulty and the popularity rating.

The third column displays the list of ingredients and a short description of how a particular recipe should be prepared.

On the top of the window, you can see three buttons that let you quickly jump from the home page to the schedule and the grocery's list.

Also in the main window, at the bottom of every panel, you have a plus button that enables you to add new groups, recipes or ingredients, respectively.

At the bottom of the third panel, there is also a small button with two complementary arrows, that enables you to resize the window.

The Works

Organized Gourmet is intuitive and airy. There is nothing simpler than adding a new group, recipe or ingredient: you can use either the File menu options or the buttons that border the three panels in the main window.

In case you don't know by heart all the ingredients from a certain recipe, or you want to let yourself inspired by new gourmet trends, you can also import a file from your disk or even load the content of a website from the Internet.

Also, as any decent application of its kind, Organized Gourmet offers you the possibility to edit and print the recipes.

But besides its simplicity and good functionality, Organized Gourmet is fun to use: it lets you browse through all sorts of exquisite recipes, it shows you how you can add your own entries and it provides you a quick but efficient method to plan the meals.

Here is a simple chain of actions that could make you see how the application works: after you have made up your mind for a particular recipe, you can switch to the calendar window and drag-and-drop the recipe over the day you plan to cook it. At the same time, you can go to the shopping list and summarize the ingredients you need.

It is really that simple.

The list can be as specific as you like it, you have the wonderful option to specify in detail, for every particular ingredient the amount, a unit of measure, the food category in which it belongs, the recipe in which it is used and eventually to make some notes about it.

Those options are great, especially if you take into account situations when you have to prepare lunch or dinner for a lot of guests, dishes and, of course ingredients.

Not to mention that there might be situations when you don't have the time to go shopping by yourself and you have to ask somebody else to do it for you, so the list should be as complete and clearly stated as possible to avoid any misunderstanding.

Back to the "yummy" part of Organized Gourmet. The default collection of recipes is pretty impressive, not only because of the great number of entries (in the demo version you can access 40 of the 90 recipes), but mostly due to the great care with which the recipes were selected.

Whether you want to prepare a Sunday breakfast, a light-fat lunch or a romantic dinner, you will surely find something that will impress your guests.

Moreover, it can be easily seen that the person who made the selection was a down-to-earth one. The recipes are not stuffed with funky ingredients that cannot be found in the supermarkets.

And in case you don't find an ingredient or you don't like it and you want to adjust the recipe to your own taste, you can easily do that by hitting the plus button on the bottom of the page.

If you got to such a point, you would probably find useful to scan other info about the recipe that you plan to prepare, like the source from where it was downloaded.   You might find this option particularly useful especially if you are interested in discovering other related dishes and in further populating your personal recipes library.

To find out more about the display options associated with a particular recipe, use the "i" button on the bottom of the page. You can also edit the recipes from this point of view, in case you want to add a more relevant picture (maybe one made during cooking), to change its background color, group or serving time.   An the same time, if you want to get rid of all the pictures and formatting options and see the recipes in plain text (for a clear printing maybe), you can easily do that from the View menu, by choosing the "Just text" template.

The Good

The Bad

The Truth