Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Butter, anyone? And Getting Organized...

So a few weeks ago we went to Shimla to visit friends. While we were there, we noticed signs around Himachal proudly proclaiming that Amul butter products were NOT being sold in Himachal. I realized I'd been having a hard time finding butter recently, and wondered what was up. Rumor has it that Amul has been caught adding large amounts of melamine to their butter to cut down on costs. I'm still having a hard time finding anything but the individual sized packages, and this week decided if they're putting melamine in their butter (the stuff those unbreakable dishes are made from!) then it was worth it to buy the imported butter. Ouch. Let's hope it gets taken care of, or the Britannia Milk Man butter starts cranking out more due to the demand. :) Anyone out there experimented with making your own butter? I know it's not that hard to do if you're getting full cream milk. I'd love to hear from you if you do.

Second, I have been dreaming of a computer program that will organize my recipes, help me plan menus for the week and automatically generate grocery lists. I figured someone out there had thought of this before, so I did a quick search online. I have a Mac, so I was looking for a Mac friendly program. I was surprised at how easy it was! I bought a program called Computer Cuisine for $20 that is incredible! It is super easy to use and looks like a cute homey cookbook. It came with 1000 recipes, most of which I deleted. :) I can add my recipes in a few seconds by cutting and pasting from my Word document I've been keeping them in. It sorts them however you want: by ingredients, by category, by serving... And I can generate a weekly menu, and a shopping list from it. Wow! It's taking some time to get all the data into it, but once I do, I think it will be a huge time saver. Right now I've got recipes that I use regularly in several different cookbooks, saved online, in a Word document, in about five different places. This will be really helpful for me to keep track of all of them, and to keep track of what I've posted on here, because each recipe has a "Notes" section with it.

This program has a Windows and a Mac version. If you're interested, you can download a trial here:

http://www.inakasoftware.com/cuisine/



2 comments:

  1. Eek! I didn't know that about the butter! Yikes!!! Thanks for the info!

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  2. Wow! That sounds like a GREAT program! Thanks for telling us about it.
    I haven't attempted to make my own butter yet but I think you can do it in a blender. This link gives instructions, but it's basically putting some heavy cream that has been sitting out at room temperature for a couple hours into your blender on the lowest setting possible for about 10 minutes. I'll have to give it a try some time! (If you don't have a blender you can make butter by putting it in a jar and shaking it for 30 minutes - let the kids take turns if it's a plastic jar).

    http://www.kountrylife.com/content/how21.htm

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