A chicken in every pot, a Mac in every kitchen

I love to cook. I do 85% of the cooking in our house and create, test, alter and enjoy all types of recipes. My cabinet is full of cookbooks and three binders full of recipes I have printed out, torn from magazines or handwritten in the hopes of trying one day. It was a fine system, or so I thought.

One day, my wife was looking through a magazine and came across an advertisement for a program that creates a recipe database. Ever the organizer, she recommended I check it out to tame the madness that is my recipe cabinet. I did, but found it was only for PC’s. I thought, “There has to be something like this for Mac, right?”

I was not disappointed. Turns out there are several Mac-compatible programs out there.  I downloaded a demo of MacGourmet onto my MacBook Pro, tried it for a few days and—wow! It wasn’t long before I purchased the software (a mere $25) and was adding, searching and importing recipes.

My first order of business has been to enter all the handwritten, faded, food-stained recipes I have stored in my binders. These are the recipes passed on from relatives that are irreplaceable, at least to a foodie like me.

A great feature of the software is the “Chef View,” an enlarged window with black and white text of the recipe in a large enough font that even my 75 yr old aunt Lois can read (she makes a darn good chicken parmesan). I take my MacBook Pro into the kitchen, open the recipe software and start cooking without the worry of spilling on my cookbook or measuring incorrectly because I can’t read the smudged type of a recipe I printed out years ago.

My Mac is not only a vehicle for audio entertainment, games, e-mail and web surfing. It is now an integral part of my family’s meals. All I have to do is back-up my laptop’s hard drive on my Mercury Elite-AL external hard drive (plus a quarterly back up to another drive I keep off site, just in case) and I no longer fear losing all the hard work and recipes I’ve collected.

To get you started on your own recipe collection, here is one of our favorites:

Smoked Sausage and Sauerkraut

Ingredients:

• 1 Package smoked sausage, sliced
• ½ yellow onion, sliced
• 1 Can Sauerkraut, drained and rinsed
• 2 cloves garlic minced
• ½ tsp Caraway seeds
• ¼ tsp cumin
• 1 Tbls brown sugar
• Oil for cooking
• Butter
• ½ cup water
• Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

1. Over medium high heat, heat small amount of oil in pan and working in batches, brown sausage on both sides,
2. Remove and set aside.
3. Heat some more oil and butter in pan and add onions, salt and pepper, sauté until soft and brown, 5-8 min.
4. Add garlic, caraway seeds and cumin to pan, toast for 20-30 seconds
5. Add sauerkraut, sauté for 2-4 min mixing well with onions, scraping up any brown bits on the bottom
6. Put sausage back into pan, add brown sugar and water, and stir to combine
7. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer 12-15 min.
8. Serve with dinner rolls or bread and butter, (yum)

Enjoy!

OWC has no affiliation with this software and receives no benefit related to this support (other than a benefit we all share in the continued support of these applications). If you appreciate the function or functionality this software offers, we encourage you to support the authors.

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