For a long time, I was on the hunt for the perfect recipe manager for my Mac. I had a lot of loose index cards that my mom gave me and needed a digital copy of the recipes before I managed to accidentally catch the paper copies on fire while cooking (stranger things have happened). I had gone through the free trials of a few different programs with various success.

I started with SousChef and created all my recipe files in there. It was a pretty decent program with some neat features, but the “import” option was lacking and it was just a little quirkier than I cared for.

Next up was MacGourmet, which was the same price but had a more professional feel to it. It was able to import my SousChef files right out of the box, which was awesome. I liked a lot of the tools that it had, but I was really irked by the fact that many of the better features were separate addons that had to be purchased separately. Overall, it felt too expensive for what it was.

Then, one day I was browsing the App Store, and came across YummySoup! on there. The first thing that caught my eye was that it had all the same major features as the other programs I tried, but was only half the price. I’m always up for saving a few dollars, so I grabbed the trial version. It was pretty much love at first sight, but with a small rocky start.

Sadly, it wasn’t a one-click import from MacGourmet (since I had added more recipes while using it), but it was still pretty easy. I may have just done it wrong, maybe it was supposed to be one-click. In the end, I got all my recipes in there with very minimal fuss, and that’s really all that mattered to me.

It was pretty smooth sailing from there, though. The first thing I was asked was which template I wanted to use for my recipes. I, of course, picked the grey-and-pink one!

One of the first things I loved was the visual browse-by-photo bar on the top. It’s a clever way to see the visual of your options, without being intrusive. But, if you’d rather just see a list, that’s an option, too.

The category system is a lot easier to use for me, too. The drag-and-drop works great and it comes with some preloaded options. You can control what categories appear without losing tags, so you can use as many tags as you want without having the Groups section be cluttered. It’s also got smart filtering!

I was really impressed by the recipe importer, though. It can automatically import with one click from a number of large recipe sites, such as All Recipes, Epicurious, and Food Network. The highlighting import method works really well with any online recipe though, including quickly grabbing the delicious looking photo that goes with it.

The coolest thing though, that I didn’t see in either of the other programs, was the special print options. The print engine can give you either a full page, or a standard 4×6 inch index card. Each template comes with a “low-ink” format and a “photo” format, depending on how fancy you want to print your cards. I’m really excited to print out all my recipes to little cards and put them in a binder to keep in my kitchen!

There’s a couple things that can be improved, but nothing major. Overall it’s a fantastic program! I just took a peek and it looks like the price has gone up a few dollars, but in my opinion it’s still well worth the cost (which is still a few bucks cheaper than the others). I heart YummySoup!

Yoshi has written a review of the Ninja Kitchen System 1100 on his site. You should check it out if you’re interested in a new blender!