BigOven.com - What's for Dinner?

Don’t know what to cook for the family tonight? If you’re sick of the same old tired pasta dishes, try your luck at a site like BigOven which lets you swap recipes with other users to spice up your culinary repertoire. BigOven offers both on-site tools to help you churn out an excellent meal, and software that helps you manage and edit your recipe collection. In terms of the features on the site alone, you can search for recipes, plug in ingredients to see what sorts of meals you can cook with the food you have at your disposal, upload your recipes, and interact with other users. You can keep track of other users’ activity by seeing what recipes they have uploaded, what recipes they have rated, what photos they have uploaded, and you can check out there “try soon”queue to see what they’re planning on cooking in the future. If you choose to go the extra mile and purchase the software, you’ll be able to extend the site’s functionalities to your desktop and manage your recipes from your computer. The software offers recipe upload, drag-and-drop organizing, grocery lists, automatic recipe ingredient recalculating if you need to resize, and a slew of other useful tools. Using the site is free, but the software will set you back anywhere from $10 to $30 dollars depending on the version you choose to purchase.

“Swap recipes, make friends, get dinner ideas!
Join BigOven.com (free!), get meal-planning organized, and share your favorite recipes with other cooks around the world”.

If you’re a person who has hundreds of recipes crammed into a collapsing three-ring binder, Big Oven could certainly help you organize your kitchen. Apart from the numerous useful organizational tools offered on the site itself, the Big Oven software in particular has unique and helpful functionalities which not only allow to manage your recipes, but also help you with otherwise potentially time-consuming tasks like calculating nutritional value of a meal and scaling recipes up or down in portions.

I’m not convinced that the extra features on the software in comparison to the free tools on the site would be enough to make someone want to spend money to purchase it.