I got my first Mac laptop (an iBook G3, the white version, not the colorful toilet-seat kind) my sophomore year of college, after my Compaq laptop’s electrical system crapped out. Of course, I’d been begging for a Mac for years, only to be shot down by the “It costs too much!” argument again and again. I only secured that iBook by promising to pay for half of it myself out of my work-study funds.

Being even then a Food Network addict and cooking fan, I decided I needed to have a recipe organizer, like that program MasterCook we had an old version of sitting around on a CD somewhere at home. I started searching and could only come across some “program” that was really a FileMaker database souped-up with AppleScripts and something new called Yum that exemplified the cliché, “You get what you pay for.” Back then, OS X shareware development was slow going, as the Jaguar version running on my spiffy new iBook was only the first iteration people were willing to try en masse.

Scott to the rescue! My sweetie uncovered MacGourmet, a program still in beta but with an actually usable and attractive interface. It was sort of like iTunes, and thankfully, it ran natively on OS X. He bought me a license as a present when the program went final, which was a good idea, as I was already hooked.

Fast forward several years, and I still have MacGourmet storing all the recipes I download from the Internet. It’s progressed greatly from that beta I started with, and entering recipes from the web is now extremely fast and easy. My library has been growing by leaps and bounds since version 2 arrived.

Over at TidBITS, a reviewer looked at 10 Mac recipe organizers (I found the link over on MacGourmet.com). Ten! We’ve come a long way. You can read the article, but note that MacGourmet came up as the favorite. I picked the right horse, I guess.

I add my recommendation to Andy Affleck’s.

Recipes I post on this site will more often than not come with a MacGourmet file available for download into your library, should you also have the program. To learn more, visit the MacGourmet site.

Tagged: Software Review, Internet Kitchen