I'm a pretty good cook and, even though I don't cook a lot, I enjoy trying out new recipes.  I've clipped recipes, searched for recipes on the web, and amassed quite a collection of cookbooks over the years.  Recently I decided to organize my recipes into an electronic cookbook.  My requirements for an electronic cookbook included menu planning, automatic creation of a shopping list, and easy integration of recipes and shopping lists with my Pocket PC.  After trying out a few applications I settled on Big Oven. 

BigOven.com

Big Oven is more than just a recipe application.  It it also a comprehensive website that encompasses an extensive, searchable recipe database of over 160,000 recipes and an online social network that you can join to swap recipes, trade tips and chat with other cooking enthusiasts.

When you join Big Oven, you get your own web page that you can personalize and share with your family and friends. 

Information that you can put on your web page includes links to:

• Try Soon Queue: an ordered list of recipes that you might want to try sometime within the next 30 days. When you browse the Big Oven recipe database, you can add recipes to your Try Soon Queue.  Your friends can also add recipes to your Try Soon Queue by "suggesting recipes to you from any recipe page. Recipes in your Try Soon Queue are automatically removed from the queue after 30 days.
• Recipes you've posted to Big Oven.  You can publish recipes to Big Oven's website from Big Oven's desktop application (if you have installed it to your computer) or you can input recipes directly to Big Oven's website.
• Recipes you've rated
• Favorite Recipes
• Photos you've posted to Big Oven
• Menu plans
• Social groups (or BigOven Discussion Groups) you belong to
• Videos you've posted to Big Oven

Your web page and all of the links included on the web page, such as posted recipes and menu plans, are all posted in Big Oven's public web space.  You can view and retrieve information from your chef page from any computer or from your mobile device.

Big Oven Software

Big Oven's software solution consists of computer software and a free Windows Mobile companion software.  The computer software is fairly intuitive, has a decent user interface and includes some nice features:

Calendar:  You can plan your meals each week by dragging recipes to any day in the calendar.  Then after you've created your menus, Big Oven can automatically create a shopping list from the meal plan.

Shopping List: Being able to automatically generate a shopping list from the week's menu plan is a great feature and one I plan to use regularly.  However, the shopping list module is quite limited:

• Adding non recipe specific items to the shopping list is extremely tedious.  A workaround for this limitation is to create a "recipe" where all the listed ingredients are your commonly purchased grocery items.  Then you'll add that recipe to your weekly calendar and when the shopping list is automatically generated all those items will be included on your shopping list. 
• There is currently no way to automatically email the shopping list to anyone (like a spouse).  A workaround for this limitation is to print the shopping list to a PDF file or a Microsoft XPS Document Writer file and then email the file to yourself or someone else.

Free Recipes: The software includes several recipe boxes that are segregated by category (I.e., appetizers, chocolate, pasta, weight watchers, etc.)  and you can also download and install additional recipe boxes. 

You can manually key your own recipes directly into Big Oven and you can import recipes into Big Oven from other recipe applications or from text file.

The software is integrated with Big Oven's website and some nice web-based options are available when your computer is connected to the internet:

• Recipe Archive allows you to search Big Oven's recipe database by recipe title, main ingredient, cuisine, preparation method, season or occasion, or by course or dish
• Idea Wizard allows you to input your desired criteria for a recipe and then returns a list of recommended recipes that meet your criteria
• Leftover Wizard searches either the Big Oven website or recipes stored locally and returns a list of recommend recipes for up to three ingredients that you have on hand.

The Deluxe Edition of the software costs $29.95 or you can get the Starter Edition for $9.95 (you can see the differences between these two versions here). The software provides quite a few other features and I encourage you to download the 30 day fully functional trial version of the software.

Big Oven's Windows Mobile Companion Software has limited functionality, but it allows you to sync your recipes and shopping list to your Pocket PC.  Sync is one way (from the computer to the Pocket PC), so changes made to the shopping list on the mobile device will not be synced over to the computer.  The mobile companion software can be installed to Windows Mobile 2000, 2002, and 2003, and WM5.0 touch screen devices.

Recipes

One of my most important requirement in a recipe software was that it provide a way for me to take my recipes with me on my Pocket PC, and Big Oven's Windows Mobile Companion Software satisfies that requirement nicely. 

You won't be able to manually input or edit recipes on your Pocket PC but you can sync recipes to your mobile device and you can download recipes directly to your mobile device from Big Oven's website.

Syncing recipes to a mobile device is easy.  First you publish them from the Big Oven desktop software to the ActiveSync syncing folder.  Then when you sync to your computer, the recipes are copied to a Big Oven folder found in the My Documents folder in the Pocket PC's main memory.

The Mobile Companion Software provides a way for you to download recipes directly from Big Oven's website to your mobile device and a way to search Big Oven's recipe database from your mobile device.

Downloading & Searching for Recipes from a Mobile Device

Tapping Tools > Download Recipes from Big Oven allows you to download your "Try Soon Queue" or "Favorites" recipes or those of a specific BigOven chef (all members are "chefs") directly to your mobile device (as long as you have an internet connection).

You can also choose to download the top 25 Favorites of all chefs.

Tapping Tools > Find a Recipe on BigOven allows you to key in search terms.  When I keyed "Chocolate Chip Cookies," BigOven returned 250 recipes.

Shopping List

Shopping Lists can also be synced to the Pocket PC, but unfortunately syncing the BigOven shopping list to my Pocket PC did not work very well.  Problems syncing the shopping list are documented in BigOven's Product Message Board, but there is no clear and reliable resolution to the problem.  A workaround for this issue is to simply copy the shopping list to the mobile device.  For this workaround to work, you need to:

• Rename the shopping list from the default "Shopping List.bgs" to "My Current List.bgs" before the Pocket PC will recognize the file
• Copy the shopping list to the My Documents\BigOven\Shopping Lists folder in the Pocket PC's main memory.

Even after getting the shopping list to my Pocket PC, I found Big Oven's Shopping List to be far inferior to the other shopping list applications I have used:

• The shopping list includes check boxes, but items are not removed from view after they are checked off.
• The shopping list includes a department column where you can specify the department where items are usually found, but there is no way to sort the list by department or by food item.
• Adding items to the list is extremely tedious since the shopping list does not provide a way to select items off a master list.

I will continue using the shopping list application I've used for years as my primary shopping list, and I will generate a BigOven shopping list from my weekly meal plan that I will manually merge with my regular shopping list.  

I fiddled around with the Quickfill Ingredient List option but never figured out what was quick about it or how this option works. 

The Mobile Cloud

If you don't have a touch screen Pocket PC or if you don't want to install yet another application to your mobile device, you can use Big Oven's mobile website.  Simply join Big Oven, post your recipes online to your chef's page and peruse the 160,000+ recipes that are posted there.  Save recipes in your own "Try Soon Queue" or "Favorites" folders and review and retrieve those recipes from your windows mobile device.

Big Oven's mobile website is accessible by entering http://www.bigoven.com/m in your Pocket PC's browser.  See a short tour of Big Oven's mobile website from my IPAQ hx2415.

Final Thoughts

Big Oven's website is well organized and has a rich array of content.  You can easily spend several hours there browsing through the recipes, reading informational articles, reviewing the user forum, and viewing instructional cooking videos.  Big Oven's desktop software application has a nice user interface, is very easy to use and has a lot of really nice useful features.  The Mobile Companion software is not remarkable, but it is free and satisfies my requirement of syncing my recipes to my Pocket PC.

Big Oven's developer continues to enhance and improve both the website and the software application.  I hope to see enhancements to the shopping list and mobile website in future releases.