|
|
1. Adding Recipes to the Shopping ListYou can choose which Shopping List to send your recipe if you click on the yellow plus-sign icon on the right side of the screen. Not on the arrow beside it, but on the icon itself. Otherwise, the recipes will be added to whatever Shopping List was last viewed. You can combine two shopping lists that were previously saved with unique names. Open one of the lists. In the upper right corner of the screen is a box called Combine Shopping Lists. Choose the name of the other list you want to combine with the current one. You can then save the combined list with a new name (File > Save Shopping List AS) so your original lists are not changed. [ Top of Page ] 2. Changed UnitsQ: I was working with 3 recipes and they called for 2 1/2 cups flour, 2 1/2 cups flour and 2 cups flour. When I clicked "Combine" in the Shopping List, I got 1 3/4 quarts flour on my shopping list. How come? A: This conversion is by design. Did you notice that all the tablespoons of sugar were combined too. Changed many tablespoons to cups. Easy to buy that way. Cups will be combined and converted to quarts. So, if we were to use ounces instead, for our dry measures, it would be more accurate for shopping, nutrition and formula. When we rescale a recipe, the units are not changed. It leaves it up to us to change to the unit of choice. The shopping list is geared more toward bulk and purchase. [ Top of Page ] 3. Shopping List Total MissingIf your computer's currency settings are set for something other than US dollars, the TOTAL in the Shopping List screen may remain blank instead of showing you the total cost of the shopping list. Go to Start > Control Panel > Regional and Language Options. Click "Customize" and choose the "Currency" tab. Change the currency symbol to dollars and the negative currency format to ($1.1). Click "OK" twice to complete. This procedure only changes the currency - the date format and time remain correct for your region. This should solve the problem. [ Top of Page ] 4. How do they work together?Q: I have created a new pantry list and have placed a check beside everything I already have. I then went to meals and added my chosen recipes to a shopping list. Here's where I am stumped. If I leave a check on all of the items in the shopping list indicating that I need them why doesn't the merge button uncheck the items I already have in my pantry? A: This tip appears in PamE's Tips "cookbook", which you can download from her website, http://mc6help.tripod.com/ [quote] The Merge feature will merge your shopping list into your pantry. However, you will need to use the "Make New Shopping List From Pantry" command from the File Menu to merge your pantry into your shopping list. Here is how it works in version 5.05: In your shopping list you have these items with checkmarks to show that you NEED them: 1 gallon milk 1 gallon milk ******* Now set your pantry up like this (with no checkmarks to show that you DON'T HAVE them): 1 pound butter 1 pound butter Now you can add recipes or whatever to this shopping list and save it. [end quote] ******* Q: I went through my cookbooks and chose 5 meals I wanted to prepare in a week, I then added those recipes to a shopping list. Now I am not sure if I need to edit some of those ingredients after I move them to the shopping list or not - I assumed I could press "combine ingredients" button and it would do it for me. I then made a pantry list with the same name as my shopping list and typed in all the products I had already at home. This is where I ran into much trouble. When I tried with whole units it worked okay but I simply don't understand about the adding the recipes to "Shopping" and then merging "Pantry" so I can get a complete list. Sometimes it does uncheck some of the items but not all. A: If you have a pantry, that's where you start. And you may want to make up a fake pantry and a couple of fake recipes to practice with. It *is* hard to see sometimes -- yes! There are two things you might be running into here. The first is that "combine ingredients" is supposed to take care of the situation where you have 1 cup sugar in one recipe and 1 cup sugar in another recipe. It should combine them so the listing is for 2 cups sugar. It will not combine Shopping List and Pantry. The other thing is that "combine ingredients" will combine a weight with another weight or a volume with another volume, but it cannot combine, say, 1 cup sugar and 1 pound sugar. You may be running into this same concept when you try to merge shopping list and pantry together -- you say that merge will uncheck some items, but not all. I don't think MC realizes that if your Pantry shows you have "5 pounds" of sugar, you will not have to buy "1/2 cup" sugar. So your ingredients should be listed in the pantry according to how your recipes will call for them. But -- I think you are still not starting with your pantry. Here is what I did: I made a pantry of three items: 2 cups flour I checked flour and water to say I had them. I did not check sugar (and I did not enter an amount). I saved it as "test". Go to File>Make New Shopping List From Pantry. This step is the key one -- if you want your needed pantry items to show up on the shopping list, you must start here. Then go to Shopping list tab. See that the sugar is listed and has a check that you need it. Good. Then drag a recipe onto the shopping list from MasterList -- ingredients are 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup sugar and 1 cup water. Those ingredients show up on shopping list. I click "check all", because I want them for my recipes. Click on "merge" while in Shopping List, and MC will compare my shopping list with my pantry and uncheck items already in the pantry from the shopping list. It does. The only items that remain checked are the sugars. But neither "merge" nor "combine ingredients" will combine that 1/2 cup sugar from the recipe with the unspecified amount of sugar I said I needed in Pantry. Q: I did this test, but I don't understand why the pantry shows I have 2 cups of flour when I think it should have subtracted the 1/2 cup used in the recipe from there. A: It isn't designed to do this. The merge feature doesn't subtract amounts, just items. [ Top of Page ] 5. Number of Items in PantryQ. I was entering my pantry and entered my 100th item. Now it won't let me enter any more. Does anyone know how to get around this? A. You need to insert a new row. [ Top of Page ] 6. Search Pantry and What Can I Make?This is from the readme.txt file that installed with your MasterCook: 16) WHAT CAN I MAKE The "What Can I Make" feature of the Pantry (under Shopping) and "Search for Ingredients in Pantry" (under Search) match ingredients in the Pantry with ingredients in recipes. Only the recipes in which all ingredients are found in the pantry will be returned by the search. Only pantry entries that are found in the MasterCook ingredient list are considered for the search. If an ingredient in a recipe is nutritionally linked to an ingredient in the MasterCook Ingredient list, the pantry must contain the name of the MasterCook Ingredient list item, NOT the ingredient named in the recipe. ------------ ------------ A: This sounds correct. Search does not look at your shopping list at all, and looks only at the ingredient name in your Pantry. It apparently doesn't look at whether there is a checkmark in the "have" column. ------------ 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. ------------ 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?" ------------ For example, if you enter "corn" in your Pantry, you will get back recipes using "corn," "frozen corn," and "frozen corn kernels." [ Top of Page ] |
