I’ve started organizing all my recipes so healthy and tasty dishes like this don’t go the way of the Dodo!

I’ve spent months researching a good recipe manager. Nothing seems to meet my needs. Am I that picky or are these programs designed by people who don’t cook healthy foods? It seems like a little of both. Besides having a consolidated location for all my recipes, I really want one that can do the nutrition calculations. I thought I found it with MacGourmet. Nope!

The program isn’t intuitive, the nutrition calculator is horrible (the big selling point for me), and  frankly it wastes my time fighting serving size selection and missing ingredients — it really has no clue that something called sea salt is real. As an added bonus, I’m stuck with hundreds (if not thousands) of non-LCHF recipes unless I want to manually delete each one. Grrrr!

So I spent today coming up with a simple template in Excel and dropping in my recipes. Sure it can’t do the nutrition calculation, but at least I’ll have all of my recipes organized and in electronic files. And to avoid scrolling hell, I figured out how to add hyperlinks within the file. Bonus!

For the nutrition info, I’ll just continue using My Fitness Pal. It’s not a great solution but I can’t beat the price since most of the data is crowd sourced (and not very well at that).

But I do have my eye on Paprika — the recipe app not the delicious spice. A lot of home cooks I know swear by it and I hear a new version with a nutrition calculator is on the horizon. We’ll see.

Picking What Stays & Goes
I spent the day adding focusing on just the sauces, marinades, salad dressings, compound butters. After about 6 hours of hard work I feel like I haven’t even made a serious dent. I’ve created and collected a bazillion recipes over the last 4+ years, many I haven’t touched for ages. Either they were lost in various apps, paper files or computers.

But I can’t bear to permanently purge recipes. Who knows when I’ll get a hankering for some Lavender, Mint & Lemon Butter. So that means multiple recipe files — holiday, seasonal, popular, one and done, etc.

Plus all those low-fat recipes I loved that I want to convert into LCHF approved meals. Yikes!  I think I’ll leave that for phase 2.

Looks like this is going to take longer than a week.