Cook'n Recipe Organizer for Windows

Organize your recipes and your kitchen

There seems to be loads of cookery software landing on my desk these days. Cook'n Recipe Organizer is the latest contender.

Cook'n Recipe Organizer has a large online community, so I was hoping that the program would be a little fancier than some of its competitors. Unfortunately, it's not - in fact, it's kind of ugly! This first impression isn't helped by the fact that Cook'n Recipe Organizer doesn't come with any recipes pre-loaded, which means that to see how it works you need to jump straight into the import process.

Cook'n Recipe Organizer can handle recipes from various sources. You can add your own manually, filling in all the relevant fields, or import in Cook'n's own recipe format, Mastercook or MealMaster files. There's absolutely no information already in the program, so you'll have to manually approve all the new ingredients and measurements. Bear in mind that Cook'n Recipe Organizer doesn't support batch imports unless you buy entire cookbooks from the developer's website.

Once you have added a few recipes, Cook'n Recipe Organizer turns out to be a good, standard recipe management program, but it's by no means impressive and doesn't have any features that I haven't seen elsewhere. Meal planning, grocery list and nutritional information are nice touches, but you'll have to enter a lot of recipes manually before Cook'n Recipe Organizer is really functional. Even then, it's not going to knock your socks off.

It takes a lot of work to get Cook'n Recipe Organizer to a usable state, and when you do, it isn't even that impressive.