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1. Expanded Search (Versions 6+ Only)MasterCook 6 gave the Expanded Search a new look and new functions. It's more intuitive. Easier to use. I can do most of the things I normally would do with an expanded "keyword" search and set the focus in the new checklist. It also displays my criteria! I like this a lot. MASTERCOOK 3'S BOOLEAN SEARCH VS. MASTERCOOK 6'S EXPANDED SEARCH: When MasterCook 5 came out, I missed MasterCook 3's Boolean search. MasterCook 6's search is a great update! We can type the ingredients in one at a time. We can limit the search to certain categories. We can include and exclude ingredients. Pick multiple categories from the list having using the Ctrl key. We can do this in one step, but we don't have to anymore. Besides, sometimes it's not logically possible to do it in one sweep. When we need another pass, we can search only the "found" recipes for the next criterion. Think of the possibilities! Although MasterCook 3 had this feature, it sometimes didn't work. It does work in MC 6. Plus MasterCook 6 has another new feature: It saves search criteria. I can set up all the conditions I need to find recipes that are "100% vegan" -- conduct the search (in all or a selection of cookbooks). Save all of those set-ups in a search-criteria file. Next time I need vegan recipes, I just open my "vegan" criteria file; edit the conditions or books somewhat if need be and go. This is a very useful feature in MasterCook 6. [ Top of Page ] 2. Faster Searches in MasterCook 6+You know how some programs prepare an index before they search and then they search the index for your keywords? Well, MasterCook 6.0 includes this as a new feature -- indexing -- and it does dramatically increase the speed of keyword searches. This is from the manual, "Indexes are a listing of the characters and words in a recipe. When you perform a search, MasterCook will use the index to quickly return search results for you. Then, any recipes that are not indexed will be searched." Searches are must faster with cookbooks that are indexed, and it is recommended that you update your cookbook indexes on a regular basis. By the way, an index gets updated when we change a cookbook. You can read more about it in the manual or Online Help (press the F1 key on your keyboard while inside the program). [ Top of Page ] 3. Food Exchanges SearchQ: I am a diabetic. Is there any way I can put in my daily units such as Breakfast: 2 starch, 1 milk, 1 protein, 1 fruit/vegetable and Lunch: 2 starch, 2 protein, etc.? I would like MasterCook to check if the recipe meets my nutritional requirements. This would be great when making a meal plan for a week or month. I realize that I can create menus for breakfast (breakfast - Cheerios, breakfast- oatmeal, etc) but where I lack variety is in lunch and supper. A: If you are referring to searching for recipes, you can use the advanced search and look for recipes that meet your food exchange guidelines. Select Search from the navigation bar along the bottom of the MasterCook screen. Select the Advanced Search button. Scroll through "Limit Search To:" until you get to the food exchanges. Highlight one. Select the "Between" radio button. Type in your numbers. Select Search. You will then be given a list of recipes in the search results window. You could then copy them by selecting Copy from the Edit Menu. Then you could open up a menu and paste them there. [ Top of Page ] 4. IngredientsDid you know that the ingredient search is aware of its ingredient hierarchy? E.g., search for 'nuts' and you get anything from cashews to walnuts; search for 'poultry' to find chicken, turkey, pheasant etc.; 'beef' to find steak, sirloin, hamburger, beef ribs, etc., 'dried fruit' to find prunes, raisins, dried apricots, etc. Although searches are limited to the ingredients in the ingredient list, it does respect links in recipes: if you link a recipe ingredient 'green stuff' to cilantro and then search for 'cilantro', the search will return the recipe with 'green stuff'. This is VERY different from pre-5.0 versions in which ingredient searches actually only performed a string search (e.g., search for 'apple' and find 'pineapple' or search for 'ham' and get 'hamburger' or 'champagne' Another point is that some types of searches are much faster than others. MasterCook recognizes this and performs the fastest search first. Fast searches include recipe title, cuisine, category and rating. Slowest searches are keyword and nutrition searches. Adding virtually any kind of restriction (e.g. a category) to a keyword search will cut down the number of recipes the keyword search has to crawl thru. Read 'indexed as' as 'a specific form of'. Lean ground beef is a specific form of ground beef which, in turn, is a specific form of beef. Searching for beef will find all three. Searching for ground beef will find itself and its more specific derivative, lean ground beef. If you picture it as a tree structure, 'food' is the trunk, big branches are major food categories (e.g., meat), limbs are generic foods (e.g., beef), twigs are more specific (e.g., flank steak), with the smallest twigs being very specific (e.g., beef jerky or shredded flank). Note that some food groups are far more sub-divided than others. The first step in an ingredient search is to collect an ingredient list consisting of the specified ingredient and all of its more specialized forms. This can be represented as the ingredient branch with all of its smaller branches limbs and twigs (always moving away from trunk): all of the ingredients nutritionally derived from the original ingredient. Each ingredient (or its nutritional link if it has one) of each searched recipe or menu is compared to this list. Note that some entries in the ingredient list (typically major food categories) do not have a specified nutrition (e.g., meat).: one would not typically use them directly in a recipe or menu. Choosing the nutrition would be very subjective and would probably change with any given user or use context. However users can fill in the nutrition on such ingredients should they need to. I myself would probably add a new 'generic' ingredient with nutrition info based on my need and then link it to the food category in question and reference my 'generic' ingredient in recipes. [ Top of Page ] 5. Keyword SearchingIf you want to avoid finding 'hamburger' when you are searching for ham, use [ As a Phrase ] and put a space after the word ham. As a Phrase recognizes things like spaces where Any and All do not. After reading about the "ice cream" search, I searched for "ice cream" as a phrase, but without spaces before and after the phrase. One of my results was a recipe for Asparagus Risotto, which had this line: "stir well, keeping rICE CREAMy." Then I repeated the search, only this time I put a space before and after "ice cream," and then all of my results were accurate. [ Top of Page ] 6. Predefined Searches (Version 7 and Above)We've wanted a way to easily sort through our recipes -- overall or in a single book -- for nutritional criteria. Now we have that and more! The Predefined Search allows us to quickly SEARCH all our recipes based on quick nutritional criteria, and we can also use them to FILTER the recipes in a single cookbook, showing us just the recipe names meeting the criteria in that book. To SEARCH, click on Search in the brown navigation bar at the bottom of the screen. On the basic Search screen click on one of the criteria and click the Open Search button. You are taken to the Expanded Search screen with the criteria you chose filled in for you. Now you can select any other criteria you'd like to add, such as selecting only certain cookbooks to be searched, or specific keywords or ingredients. To FILTER, simply open a cookbook, select a FILTER from the drop-down box in the left margin, and your cookbook will be filtered to display only the names of the recipes that meet that criteria. Important Note: The cookbooks that came with your MC program use ingredient names that appear in MC's Ingredient List or are LINKED to ingredients that appear there. The ingredients in a recipe must be recognized in order for MC to calculate nutrition. The results you get from searching or filtering your own cookbooks will depend on your attention to these details. AND MORE! Other uses for "Predefined Searches" Search criteria of your own can be saved and will appear in the Predefined lists too! (To save search criteria, from the Search screen, File > Save Search Criteria). This opens up more possibilities for using this tool.
Use for grouping cookbooks to search: This same procedure will work in MC version 6.x, too, but you will need to use File > Open to select your saved criteria; it won't be ready-listed for you.
Use filter for categorizing recipes (MC 7 Only): In MC 6.x, you can use saved search criteria to SEARCH your new cookbook for such recipes, but then you would need to drag/drop the recipe from the search results list to the open category of a different cookbook (or to the MasterList listing of a category in a different cookbook), or open each recipe individually to give it a category. [ Top of Page ] 7. Save Search Results in a MenuSome of us have wanted a way to save search results for use later (the recipe names, not the search criteria). One way is to add the recipes to the favorites window. But what if we are using favorites for favorites? TIP: To save your search results, add the recipes to a menu. There's probably a limit to the number of recipes a menu can have; we'll have to look into this, but I added 24 recipes. Example: This has potential for mini-cookbooks, too. [ Top of Page ] 8. Search, Search Pantry, and What Can I Make?Q: I have crackers unchecked in my pantry and shopping list, and yet, when I search ingredients in the pantry, I get results including the unchecked pantry items. That doesn't make any sense. A: This sounds correct. Search does not look at your shopping list. The items in your Pantry that do not have a checkmark are the items that you already have, in the amounts indicated by your pantry listing. You only put a checkmark by a pantry item if you need to buy it. Q: I performed a simple search where I simply typed in the ingredients in a recipe and I received no results, even though the recipe was in the cookbook. A: The keywords should be typed in with just a space in between them. If you include punctuation, like a comma, the search will look only for those recipes where the keyword is followed by a comma. Q: I searched a selected cookbook that I had downloaded with my pantry and found nothing. There is a recipe in it I could make with the ingredients in my pantry (zucchini, sugar and water). Why didn't the search find it? A: I set up a test pantry and test recipe using the information you provided. In the recipe, I entered the amount of sugar required as 1 1/2 teaspoons (volume). Then I "searched" two different ways. I set up advanced search to search on "Ingredients in Pantry," checked the box for "use Pantry Only" and selected the test pantry. Then I clicked on Search -- in All Available Cookbooks. The search results included the test zucchini recipe (and some caramel recipes, too). I got the same results when sugar was listed in the pantry as a volume on hand (in cups) or as a weight (5 pounds). So this search was focused on the ingredient name alone -- not on any quantity information. Then I switched to Pantry's "What Can I Make?" and searched in All Cookbooks. When the amount of sugar in the pantry was listed in weight (pounds) rather than in volume (cups) I did not get any recipes in my search results. When I changed the amount of sugar in the Pantry to be cups of sugar, "What Can I Make?" returned the names of the test recipe (and the caramel!). So the "What Can I Make?" was looking at the amounts of the ingredients as well as the ingredient names, and was not translating weights into volume equivalents. So -- to use "What Can I Make?" you will need to enter the amounts in your pantry by whatever unit your recipes most frequently call for, either volumes or weights. If you want to experiment with these functions, I suggest you save your pantry list after changing units, and then exit the program and restart it. I may have been doing something odd myself, but I found that the "What Can I Make?" function did not reset itself immediately after I changed items in the pantry to reflect volume rather than weight. I got consistent results as outlined above if I made the pantry changes, saved the pantry, then exited the program and restarted before using "What Can I Make?" [ Top of Page ] 9. Searching More Than One CookbookQ: How can I select to search different cookbooks? A: In the Search window, choose Select Cookbooks to Search (way down at the end of the list). The Select Cookbooks to Search window will pop up. You can hold down the <CTRL> key on your keyboard while choosing the cookbooks you want with the mouse. Then press the [Done] button. [ Top of Page ] 10. Selecting Ingredients to Avoid (Version 5 Only)Q: I tried doing an advanced search and clicked on "ingredients to avoid" then went through the list to highlight. When search results were returned, several ingredients I had highlighted were in the recipes. Also, even though I highlighted that line in the limits list, the word "none" seemed to remain there. Was I supposed to do something to get rid of it besides go through the ingredient list? A: Once you've multi-selected the ingredients you want to avoid using the CTRL key and clicking on the ingredient names, you have to be careful to not let go of the CTRL key when you select the last ingredient and then drag the last ingredient you select up into the space beside "Ingredients to avoid" where it says "none." You'll find the ingredients replace the word "none," with the multiple ingredients using a comma to separate them. You may want to try by dragging a single ingredient to the "Ingredients to avoid" space first, and then try multi-selecting and dragging. NOTE: In 5.03 when using the CTRL key to select more than one ingredient in 'Ingredients to Use', it automatically adds them without having to drag them up there. In MasterCook 6.x you select an ingredient and use the Add button. [ Top of Page ] |
