ShopNCook Menu - Meal Planning Software

ShopNCook Menu is a quirky program that promises to help you organize your recipes, analyze nutritional content, and manage your household shopping lists. How far it succeeds in those goals depends on how much time you're willing to spend learning how to use and customize the program.

The ShopNCook Menu interface is packed with tabs, calendars, buttons, icons, and menus--and each one has an important function. Especially important is the Overview page, which walks you through the program's features. ShopNCook Menu lets you browse recipes and analyze nutritional content (though I couldn't figure out how to access this feature); import whole cookbooks from the Web (though some of the recipes provided were well over 30 years old); easily add ingredients to provided shopping lists, and customize these lists to meet your needs; and quickly import recipes from your favorite Web sites. You can also enter your recipes manually, or import text files.

You can try ShopNCook Menu for 45 days to see if it will meet your needs--and if you can live with its quirks, such as the fact that odd bits of the interface and a few recipes are written in Italian. If you're looking for an easy-to-use recipe organizer, you may also want to try BigOven, which costs $20 less.

--Kim Saccio-Kent