Gourmet Recipe Manager

Gourmet Recipe Manager is a simple but powerful recipe-managing application. Gourmet is intended for the GNOME desktop environment, but works on any platform that gtk supports, including windows.

Gourmet allows you to collect, search and organize your recipes, and to automatically generate shopping lists from your collection. The latest version also allows you to calculate nutritional information for your recipes using the USDA food database (or entering custom information by hand). Take a look at the screenshots for a sense of how this works. You can download the Gourmet Recipe Manager from the sourceforge project page. That page also will allow you to sign up to learn about updates, to file bug reports and to make feature requests, or to sign up for the mailing list.

Gourmet's features include:

• Simple searching and sorting
• Clear, Attractive display of recipes and nutritional information
• Easy recipe editing
• Import and export from various formats
• A shopping list creator and organizer

Gourmet Recipe Manager is free software. If you want to contribute to the project and you're a python programmer, please take a look at the source code and start hacking! If you would like to use Gourmet in a language other than English, you can help translate gourmet using the rosetta web-based tool here (this requires no programming knowledge!).

If you want to contribute money, I encourage you to donate to Gourmet, donate to sourceforge, which hosts this project, or donate to the free software foundation.

Simple Search

A simple index view allows you to look at all your recipes as a list and quickly search through them by ingredient, title, category, cuisine, rating, or instructions. Searching happens as you type to save you keystrokes, and multiple kinds of searches can easily be combined from this same view (so you can search for salads (category) with walnuts (ingredient) without having to open a separate dialog. You can easily sort recipes by clicking on the column you'd like to sort by. Furthermore, for advanced users, you can search using regular expressions.

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Recipe Card Display

Individual recipes open in their own windows, just like recipe cards drawn out of a recipe box. Recipes are attractively displayed with a minimal amount of controls and settings cluttering the interface. From the recipe card view, you can instantly multiply or divide a recipe, and Gourmet will adjust all ingredient amounts and even adjust the units to keep them as readable as possible (so that 2 tbs. x 4 displays as 1/2 cup).

Since you often need to refer to ingredients as you read a recipe, the ingredient list is displayed in a separate pane, so that you can look at ingredients as you scroll through the steps of a recipe.

The recipe card view also includes nutritional information for your recipe. Clicking on the "Edit" button brings up a simple wizard that will bring you through the ingredients in your recipe, allowing you to pick equivalences from the USDA nutritional database or enter nutritional information by hand. Gourmet does its best to choose good defaults as it guides you through your nutritional information, and it remembers your settings for future recipes. The nutritional information is not directly tied to the displayed ingredient information, so you can make reasonable substitutions and approximations for nutritional calculations without damaging the integrity of your recipes. You can also tell Gourmet to ignore certain ingredients — no need to waste time looking up nutritional information for every last spice after all!

Future versions of Gourmet may make use of this information to allow searching and selecting recipes by nutritional content — for now, we just display the information we have and try to make it easy for those interested in nutrition to enter in their data as quickly as possible. In the future, we will also provide more information by default, and we may look for a way to create a community-generated database of nutritional information and equivalences.

Recipe Editor

Gourmet aims to make entering ingredients as intuitive and painless as possible, while still allowing for powerful features. Features include:

• A keyed ingredient list which allows searches and shopping-list generation to understand synonyms (like aubergine and eggplant) and ignore ingredient descriptions (i.e. to treat "tomatoes, finely chopped" as "tomatoes" for the purpose of searching and generating shopping lists.
• An intuitive spreadsheet-like editing interface
• An alternative, fast form-like ingredient entering interface (which allows you to easily type ingredient lists without looking at the screen.
• Drag-n-drop support for importing ingredient lists from your web browser or other application.
• Support for pasting ingredient lists in from your clipboard.
• Support for grouping ingredients within a recipe.
• Support for calling another recipe as an ingredient.(Note: this allows you to use a recipe as a menu!)
• Support for optional ingredients.

In addition to ingredients and instructions, you can enter information about categories, cuisines, and ratings that you can later use to search for recipes. In each case, Gourmet allows you a drop down menu of standard categories and categories you've used in the past, but also allows you to enter any custom categories you like.

You can also add images to your recipe for an attractive display. Thumbnails will be displayed in the recipe index. Currently, only HTML export supports images.

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Import and Export

Gourmet includes simple and powerful import and export filters for a number of formats, including the two most common recipe formats on the web (mealmaster and mastercook).

Gourmet can import the following kinds of files:

• Mealmaster Files
• MasterCook text files
• MasterCook XML files
• Gourmet XML files
• Websites, such as epicurious and recipezaar
• Unformatted plain text files or websites (in this case, Gourmet will ask you to identify ingredients, instructions, etc.

Gourmet also can import ingredient lists from a regular plain text list, which can be imported from a file, pasted from the clipboard or dragged onto the editing view.

Gourmet can export the following kinds of files:

• Mealmaster files
• Rich Text Format
• Plain Text
• Recipe Web Pages
• Gourmet XML files

On GNU/Linux systems, gourmet can also export PDF or postscript files via its printing interface.

Gourmet aims to import and export as many common formats as possible. If you have a format you'd like to import, please submit a feature request, or, if you're a programmer, go ahead and start writing the filter yourself!

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Shopping List Manager

Gourmet allows you to automatically generate shopping list from your recipes. You can easily multiply recipes when you add them to adjust for the number of people you're cooking for. If the units are convertable, different units used in different recipes will be added up correctly on your shoppings list (Gourmet even knows the density of some common foods to allow volume-to-weight conversions!). If Gourmet can't convert your units, the shopping list will simply display both units -- for example, the screenshot shows both tsp. and cloves of garlic, since these units can't be sensibly combined.

If you already have an item that appears on your shopping list, you can drag it into your "pantry" so it won't be included! Items added to your pantry will be remembered in the future (so you don't have to manually remove items like "water" from your shopping list every time a recipe calls for it). However, since the pantry list is shown next to the shopping list, you will always have a list at hand of all the ingredients called for by your recipes. (You can drag an item back from the pantry to the shopping list if you've run out.)

The shopping list is also automatically sorted into categories. Gourmet knows the basic categories of a number of foods (produce, meat, fish), and you can create whatever categories are convenient for your own shopping -- I use it for sorting out the basic sections and aisles of my local grocery store and those items that I get from specialty stores. You can set up shopping categories as you enter recipes, or you can move ingredients around within the shopping list view by drag and dropping or using a popup menu.

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