Hi, I’m Elaine, creator of The Recipe System.

I have extensive career experience as a software developer for some pretty great companies. I’ve always loved programming and find it therapeutic.

I also really love food! While I enjoy cooking too, I am fortunate enough to have a husband who is a fabulous cook who will take on pretty much any cuisine. He will make anything that I ask him to. But it’s my job to keep track of the recipes: the handed down family recipes; ones we’ve collected from magazines and cookbooks over the years; and fabulous internet recipes.

So it was a natural evolution for me to design software to keep our recipes organized. Quick & easy access!

My main goals with the system were to have a central location where I could put any type of recipe and then find it easily. I don’t want to have to rigidly format a recipe to get it in the system. I wanted to be able to copy and paste text or just store links or videos or a picture of a recipe if that’s all I had – or even just note in which cookbook and what page it was on. I wanted to be able to find recipes in a multitude of ways and be able to attach a cuisine and include it in as many collections as I wanted to. I did not want to create software that needed any ongoing maintenance. But I also wanted to be able to create fairly nice looking cookbooks with a subset of recipes and some recipe history if I wanted to take a little time to format the ones that would be included.

Personally, I don’t want my recipes in the cloud, but I do want to have them all on my phone. I do this by dumping my entire collection, in whatever format they exist, to a PDF that has a table of contents and lists every recipe on my system in alphabetical order and emailing it to myself every now and then. You, of course, can send your PDFs to Google Drive, your friends or wherever you like. It is so great to be able to have access to every recipe while at the grocery store or wherever you are – the PDF is really easy to search.

Over the past 19 years I’ve created a versatile recipe organizer that will allow me to throw in pretty much any kind of recipe in just a couple of minutes. Some recipes, if they are keepers, will eventually get uniformly formatted. Others will remain as they are. I’ve decided to share the system because of how excited I still am when I use it – after all this time!

A couple of other points that I’d like to mention:

Although I know that a subscription model is more lucrative, I will not do that. It makes sense for recipe organizers that require a lot of updating but this recipe software doesn’t.

The Recipe System is only available for PC’s with Windows 10 and higher. I have not found a relational database platform on the MAC that I would like to use at this point.

I don’t include recipes with the system. The internet has numerous, wonderful recipes. Although you can store at least tens of thousands of recipes in The Recipe System, any recipe organizer software with those kinds of volumes will get to be a lot to wade through. After 19 years I have about 700 recipes, many of which we still haven’t tried.

I will never sell any email addresses or any other type of information nor will I harass anyone with a bunch of emails after purchase because I really don’t appreciate anyone doing that to me.

I will make any software updates available for free on the website. I haven’t really encountered many issues after install – the system is very stable.

I do not plan to add nutritional data analysis- it is beyond the scope and requirements of my main user – me. There is lots of room, however, to add as much extra information to a recipe as you want.

I cannot issue refunds after purchase. You already have the software and the key at that point.

I hope you will enjoy using the Recipe System as much as I do!

Have fun with your recipes!

Elaine