Paprika Recipe Manager 3 is great complement to MyFitnessPal.

Is anyone else using Paprika Recipe Manager 3? My husband and I have been having so much fun trying new recipes and planning menus that are healthy with it. We love it! I tried meal planning with MyFitnessPal but did not find it to be very easy or time saving. Paprika Recipe Manager is not expensive. You can do alot just with the Windows free trial version. However, to use it for grocery shopping having it on your cell phone (for $4.99) is super helpful. In order to get the full advantage of syncing the program between devices you have to buy the full program, but it is still relatively low priced.

Here is why I love it:

1. You can collect and store recipes easily from any website or food blog. If you use the ¨bookmarklet¨ all you do is click the symbol you installed on your bookmark bar in your browser and it downloads it from your browser without ever even having to open the program. (Make sure you find the Paprika Edge extension, instructions for iPhone, or bookmarklet Javascript in order to do this. If you have problems finding them, let me know and I will put links here.)

2. For recipes like from forums, you can easily copy and paste the recipe, give it a name, change it, add notes, etc. This is great for things you want to remember that are barely recipes-- like smoothies, tips, etc. Or of course for recipes that were not from online sources.

3. When you first download a recipe from a food blog webpage, it puts it in your program uncategorized. It usually is able to download the picture of the recipe, the ingredients, directions, and often the notes, time to prepare, time to cook, etc. It also saves the webpage where you found it and has a built in browser, so you can easily find what blog it was from and look at the cooking lessons related to the recipe if it was from a blog. The built in browser has a place for you to save all your favorite food blogs and sites.

4. You choose to make any category you want, and can organize it with nesting any category under any other. Later you can edit the recipe to put it into the catagories you have created. This is great for dieting. In addition to typical categories, for example, I made a ¨masteringdiabetes¨ category for myself that I tag any recipe that meets the criteria they use (plant based, low fat, etc) I also made a smoothie category. You can nest the categories. If you go about saving several recipes of things for breakfast, you can drag and drop all of them into your breakfast categories at the same time. It is an amazingly fast way to collect recipes you want to try, especially to focus on recipes that fit within the way you are trying to eat.

5. The search features are fantastic. You can search by name, ingredients (including several for example: ¨rice, lettuce, tomatoes¨if you are thinking of a recipe but can´t recall the name), or search in the directions, desciptions, notes. If you put the recipe in there, you can find it.

6. It is so easy to enter the recipes into MyFitnessPal and log them. My beef with MyFitnessPal recipes section on the computer is that you can not search your recipes. If your recipe is stored in Paprika Recipe Manager 3, you can easily find it there and then remember exactly what the name is. You also have the website you found it in stored there, so it is super easy to copy and paste the website from the recipe manager into the part of MyFitnessPal to make it one of your recipes and log it. Or you can copy and paste just the ingredient section to do the same.

7. It´s meal planning features are so much more advanced and easier than Myfitnesspal. You can plan your meal in several different ways and if you want send them to your Google Calendar.

8. It has wonderful shopping list features. When you decide to make a recipe you can tell it to add the ingredients to your shopping list. It allows you to uncheck what you already have. Your shopping list is arranged by aisle and it aggregates the ingredients (if three recipes call for one apple, it shows you you need 3 apples.) With the full version and having its app on your phone, you can sync up to 5 versions. Then you can shop in the store, checking items off easily from your phone. Later you can clear the items you purchased from the list and the items you couldn´t find stay on the list.

9. It has several features to make it nice for having in the kitchen to cook with instead of printing the recipe, reading the recipe directly from your phone, tablet, or laptop, such as you can highlight your place, pin several recipes to switch back and forth to, etc. It also has timers you can set easily for each recipes if you have several things going.

10. You can edit recipes with your notes, rate recipes, mark recipes as favorites, and numerous similar features for those of us that tend to alter recipes. Because it saves the web address of the original recipe, if you need to go back and see what the original recipe was, it is easy.

11. It allows you to save multipe photos of your recipe. This was handy for me to make myself some recipes that were really reference materials instead of traditional recipes-- such as a recipes ¨cuts of beef¨ that had pictures that were charts of cuts of beef with names in English and Spanish.