Product Review: Living Cookbook

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while!  Last year, when I was just beginning my weight loss journey, I was on the hunt for a new cookbook/recipe cd that would help me count calories in the food I made at home.  It was very time consuming for me to look up the calorie count and nutrition facts for each ingredient in a recipe, but knowing just how many calories I was consuming was important.  I don’t remember just how I stumbled upon this, but I found a recipe organizer called Living Cookbook.  It has been such a wonderful tool for me that I stopped using all my other cookbook software.

I did not receive anything from the Living Cookbook people and these are all my own opinions about the software that I purchased myself and have been using since last November.

Okay, first off, this product is not cheap, coming in at $35.  I would not normally spend that much on software, especially since I already had some cooking software and I could actually figure out the calorie count myself by using free software on the web.  But the features in this software really sold me.  It is excellent for people like me who subscribe to tons of cooking/recipe blogs and get a lot of recipes from the web.  The Living Cookbook has the coolest “capture” feature, where you highlight and copy any recipe you see on the web and then paste it into the “capture” section of the software.  From there you highlight the different portions of the recipe, such as the title and click on the “title” tab on the side and poof!  The title is put in the recipe.  You do the same with the procedure and ingredients and poof! the software imports the ingredients and procedure into the proper places on the recipe page.  It is so cool!  No more printing up recipes off the web (IF you are lucky enough to find a printable version) no more copying them down and losing the paper, no more clogging up your favorites folder or the “starred item” section of your reader with recipes.  Just “capture” them and let the software do the rest.  You can even copy a pic to go with it.

After you have captured the new recipe you can enter the number of servings and the software will calculate the calories and nutrition for the recipe.  And you can totally customize this part…I have it set to show me how many calories are in each individual ingredient as well as in a whole serving.  I also have it set to show certain vitamins and the percentage of fat…but you can have it show you whatever you want it to!  This has been so very helpful in my quest to lose weight and get healthy.  I can see how many calories are in a dish I make at home and even change the number of servings to see exactly what size serving I can have and stay within my range.

This software has all the basic cooking software features as well, like menu planning and cookbook publishing.  I haven’t even tried all the neat features it has, as I am so obsessed with the recipe capture and calorie calculating parts lol.  If you are a recipe collecting freak or interested in tracking calories like me, this is the software to use!  They even have a 30 day trial so no worries there.  I only wonder why it’s called Living Cookbook.  I think a name change would bring them more business lol.  ;)