Shop’NCook Blog

Combining recipes is a powerful feature of Shop’NCook software that makes it easy to reuse recipes by combining them with other recipes, like recipes for sauce or dough that may be common to several preparations. Combining recipes makes it easier to manage your collection, as you only have to make changes in one place to update all the recipes using this preparation.

A recipe that includes other recipes looks as follows:

The ingredient “hollandaise sauce” is underlined to show that it links to a recipe.

If you click on Hollandaise sauce, the following recipe opens, correctly scaled to the required quantity:

Also, the nutritional analysis of the Brussels sprouts recipe, the list of ingredients to add to the shopping list, as well as the cost estimate include the ingredients of Hollandaise sauce.

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Shop’NCook Pro lets you estimate the cost of your recipes in a mostly automatic way, but you may need to some adjustments to get an accurate costing. I will show you how in this post.

Adding cost data

To cost out recipes, you have to make sure first to input cost data for the ingredients in the database. The first time you start Shop’NCook Pro, you have the possibility to import a cost database. If you skipped this step, don’t panic! You can still import it by selecting “Import cost data” in the Costing menu of the Shopping List manager tab. The cost database is there to help you get a quick start with the costing functions. For accurate costing, you will have to input your own cost data from your suppliers. Staple prices greatly vary depending on the region and the season!

Inputting your own cost data

To add your own data, click on the Edit button of the Shopping List manager tab. This will open the database editor. Select “Extended list” in the Tools menu to display all the 2000 items of the database. The cost data is input in the three columns on the right: quantity, cost unit and cost.

For example: quantity: 1, cost unit: quart, cost: 2.59, i.e. the cost of one quart of the ingredient.

Tip: you are not limited to the choice displayed in the pull down menu of the cost unit, but can type any unit of your choice in the field.

Automatic cost estimate

Once the software knows the cost data, it is able to compute automatically the cost of your recipes. Here is how the costing window may look initially:

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This video explains why ingredients are sometimes converted to shopping units when adding from recipes - and sometimes not. It also shows how to change the preferred shopping units to any units of your choice.

You can watch below three new features of the recipe editor in action. They are small improvements which should improve the usability and user experience of the editor. Do not miss the previous post on how to import a recipe in less than 20 seconds.

This video shows how a recipe can be imported into Shop’NCook in less than 20 seconds.

Note: The recipe costing is in the Pro edition and the meal planner in Menu and Pro editions only.

I receive from time to time the following inquiry from Shop’NCook users:

“What are my e-mail settings?”

E-mail settings depend on your ISP (internet service provider). You need to find out your ISP’s SMTP server address, the server port number, if authentication and SSL are required… Sometimes, I can figure the settings out by doing a Google search, sometimes it is harder.

If you are not sure of your e-mail settings or have trouble getting the send function to work, you should first ask your ISP. Or…

… you can consider the alternative solution below:

Why don’t you open a GMail account?

A GMail account takes just a couple of minutes to set up and will insure you can send e-mails from anywhere. Plus, it will keep a copy of all the messages you send - including those sent with Shop’NCook. And I can tell you exactly the settings to use with Shop’NCook, because I have one too!

Step 1.

Open a GMail account, if you don’t have one already, by following the link below:

Step 2.

Input the following settings in the Email tab of Shop’NCook Preferences:
SMTP Server: smtp.gmail.com
From: your e-mail address…
To: some e-mail address to which you want to send by default…
Server port: 465
SSL: checked
Authentication: checked
User name: your_address@gmail.com
Password: your gmail account password

Step 3. (optional)

GMail changes by default the From e-mail address to your GMail address. To avoid this, you can set your default address in your GMail account to your main e-mail address.

I receive many enthusiastic comments about Shop’NCook’s recipe wizard. The wizard is able to interpret recipes and recognize ingredients automatically, and as far as I know Shop’NCook is the only program able to do that without requiring the recipes to be formatted in some special way. Here are a couple of comments I loved:

«I have been playing with the program. I was very satisfied with the grocery list portion, and was planning to buy a registration. However, when I copied and pasted a recipe typed in Appleworks, your program “Parsed” the typed text into the Shop’NCook perfectly. Our mouths dropped open when it did that, and I was completely sold on this product.» Bruce Desjardins

«I LOVE LOVE LOVE the recipe parsing bit. That makes it so easy to import recipes (so slick!) and works so well.» June Oshiro

Unfortunately, almost as often as enthusiastic comments, I receive the following question:

“But how do I paste a recipe in the wizard?”

You see, I forgot to put a paste button in the wizard window!

Here is how you paste a recipe into Shop’NCook without paste button:

Copy a recipe to the clipboard in your favorite browser. Open the recipe wizard by clicking on the New button of the toolbar, click on the main field of the wizard and use the shortcuts “COMMAND-V” on Mac OS X or “CONTROL-V” on Windows to paste the recipe. “COMMAND-V” and “CONTROL-V” means you press simultaneously the COMMAND (or Apple) and V keys, respectively the CONTROL and V keys on the keyboard.

Another easy way to import recipes from internet is to import it with the command “Import from clipboard” in the File menu of the recipe manager. The recipe is automatically interpreted and tagged with the category “Import” for later review. See also the tutorial “Importing recipes from the clipboard”.

Oh, and yes, I will add a paste button in the next release.

Waste in recipe costing can be quite confusing. I will try to clarify here how and why waste should be included in recipe costing calculations and how it is taken into account in Shop’NCook Pro software.

A simple waste example

Quantities in recipes often refer to a pared product. For example, when you have a recipe requiring 1 cup of chopped onions, it refers to pared onions, different from the onions as purchased. One cup of onions weighs 160g (5.7oz), but since onions include in average 10% of refuse (stem ends, sprouts and defects), you have to purchase actually not 160g but 178g (6.4oz) of onions to make one cup of chopped onions. If you don’t include the waste in your recipe costing calculation, you will end up underestimating the cost of the recipe.

This is a straight-forward case where waste should always be included. Now, Shop’NCook Pro includes already in its database basic refuse precentage. To include the waste in the recipe costing, all you have to do is make sure that the waste correction is enabled in the cost preferences (the checkbox “Correct weight for refuse” in the Costing tab of the Preferences must be selected).

How do I know if the cost is corrected for waste?

When calculating the cost of a recipe with waste correction enabled, you have an additional column in the costing window for the corrected weight. It is a good practice to always check where waste corrections are made and if they correspond to the actual difference between the product as purchased and the product used in the recipe. If they don’t, read below!

A less simple waste example

Waste is not always straight-forward! In fact, waste can be included in some recipes and not in others. Depending on what you are making, you may purchase a product that includes the waste, or the same product without it. Let take for example walnuts. I would bet that your supermarket carries both shelled walnuts and walnuts with the shell. If you examine the walnuts item of the default database, you see that it includes 55% of refuse for the shells. It refers therefore to unshelled walnuts. When a recipe specifies walnuts, the weight is then corrected for waste and more than doubled in the recipe costing calculation.

What should you do if you purchase already shelled walnuts? You can edit the nutritional information of the walnuts item of the database, clear the refuse description and set the refuse percent to zero. Also, make sure to change the item description to “shelled walnuts”. In this way, walnuts weight will not be corrected for waste anymore in the recipe costing.

But I purchase both shelled and unshelled walnuts!

If you purchase both shelled and unshelled walnuts, depending on the recipe, you have to proceed in a different way. Obviously, since these are two different products with different prices, you need to have two entries in the database of grocery items. Since the existing walnuts item refers to the unshelled one, you have to add a “shelled walnuts” item to the database, with a refuse percent of zero. When you want to purchase the shelled walnuts for a recipe, you have to make sure that the “walnuts” ingredient of the recipe links to the “shelled walnuts” item of the database. It will be linked automatically to the correct item if you write “shelled walnuts” instead of just “walnuts” in the recipe. In this way, the correct refuse percentage is used in both cases.

What should I do if the weights in my recipes include the refuse?

Let’s take again the case of (unshelled) walnuts. Walnuts includes 55% of refuse in the database. What should you do if your recipes lists the quantity of walnuts with the shells? Since the software assumes the quantities in the recipes exclude the refuse, it will overestimate the quantity of walnuts you need and this will be reflected in the cost out and in the nutritional analysis of your recipes. You cannot simply set the refuse to zero: if you do, the nutritional data for walnuts will be about two times to high. Also, predefined measures like 1 cup of walnuts will not be correct anymore.

If you don’t want to correct as well the nutritional and weight conversion data for walnuts, you can instead create new units in the nutritional data editor for walnuts, like “cup with shell” and “oz with shell”. The weight of “cup with shell” should be 45% (i.e. 100%-55%) of the actual weight of 1 cup of walnuts with shells, i.e. corresponds to the weight of 1 cup of unshelled walnuts minus the refuse. Similarly, the weight of “oz with shell” should be 45% of 1 oz. To get the correct costing, you just have to specify the quantities using the newly defined units. The advantage of this approach is that you will be able to use both quantities with and without refuses.

Now, if you are not already too confused…

What should I do if the item is listed without waste in the database, but I purchase it with waste?

In this case, edit the refuse information of the item and set it to the waste percentage of the product you purchase. The nutritional analysis will not be affected, but the recipe cost out will be corrected for the waste.

Example: The “clams” item in the database is for clams without shells and has a refuse percentage of zero. If you purchase clams with shell, edit the item to set the refuse percent to 85%. Assuming your recipes list quantities without shell, the cost and the nutritional information will be correctly calculated. You can also add new units to the item to be able to specify quantities with shell in your recipes too, like the predefined “lb, with shell”. The weight of the units with waste should be set to the corresponding weight without waste.

In summary…

• Waste must be included only if the quantity in the recipe does not include the waste that is a part of the product as-purchased.
• For products that can include waste, check that the database item corresponds to the product you purchase. If it doesn’t, modify the refuse data to correspond to the product you purchase.
• The quantities (weight or volume) in the recipes should be the quantities after the refuse has been removed. If you want to specify a quantity before removing the waste, define a new unit for the product that includes explicitly the waste. Alternatively, edit the nutritional and unit data for the product so that they correspond to the product measured before the waste is removed.