Cookbook App: Recipe & Meal Planner for Nutritionists & Health Coaches

Hi there, Andrea here. Today I would like to recommend an app that can help you to organize your recipes and do meal planning. It's called Cookbook and you can see it at cookbookmanager.com. This app is incredibly affordable and it has a 4.6 star rating on Apple App Store and Google Play, which is impressive. Let's look at the pricing. This is amazing. You can use a free account to work with up to 40 recipes and if you want more than that, you can pay just $1.49 a month, $9.99 a year or $39.99 for forever access. Now, I've confirmed that this app is supported by developers. There was an update just four days ago when I checked and you can see in the lower right that little help feature. I reached out using that button and I received a response, which was very important. This is one of the biggest things you want to consider when you're selecting an app is you want to make sure that it's current and that it's supported. And these guys actually have a whole improvement pipeline set out. So this app is going to get better and better. And so I actually recommend that you get the forever access for just $40. Now, another incredible feature is that this app has, if we go to more and FAQ, this app has an incredible help section or FAQ. You know, you can get support with any topic and you can search here for anything you're looking for. How do I filter my recipes? Can I search for multiple tags? And so on and so forth. But hopefully in today's video, I'm going to show you everything you need to know and you'll be ready to set up your own account without worrying about this FAQ. So speaking of that, how do you set up an account? The first thing is you want to notice this button at the very top right. Get started. Click there. And then you have to scroll down. There it is. Create a cookbook account and then click sign up. And when you click this button, it's going to ask for your name and your email, but no credit card information. And that's important too, because you're not going to get roped up, roped in to something that you don't want. And what's amazing about the free account is that they give you access to everything. It's really nice. Now, for me, if I click here, it's actually going to open my account because I already signed up. But for you, basic information, a couple minutes, and you're good to go. Now, I should let you know that using Chrome browser is recommended. The developers say that Chrome works the best for its features. So use Chrome when you're using this app. I'm not using it today, you might notice, but I still find that it works. So there you go. We're testing together. Now, how do you add a recipe? You see all these options here, and I'm going to click add a recipe. There are many ways to add a recipe. As you can see, you can create a new blank recipe. And if I click there, I get to put the name, a description, notes, select my tags for the type of recipe, add a photo. Here's my ingredient list. And here's my directions. I can put the yield, I can make it a favorite, give it a rating, prep time, cook time, a video link if it's something you found online. So easy peasy to add your own from scratch, which is great. Cancel and close without saving. Now, the very easiest way to add a recipe is to import from a website. So now you just need a link, paste import URL. So I'm going to use a link from my website, buttered veg and import link. Now look what happens. All the information. Here's the ingredient list. Here's the instructions. Here's the image. And here's the recipe notes, the description and the name. So everything came in automatically. And all you need to do is select your tags. So this is actually a side dish. Oh, it's actually a vegetable side dish. And this was a tag that I added myself. So you can add your own tags for whatever you need right here. So I'm getting out of that. There we go. So select your tags, whatever's relevant to you. And then that's delete. Oh, save is up here on the upper right. There we go. Now that look at how nice that looks. So this is how you view recipes. You can see very clearly the different sections, the tag here. See on YouTube. Wow. The method is here. The notes, even the nutrition information, if it's present shows up here. Okay. So this is viewing recipe. I want to go back to add a recipe to show you that you can also scan a recipe from a PDF. And I'm going to select this one and open. And you need to enter a page number because this is the limitation. It only allows you to import a recipe from a single page, either a PDF or a JPEG. So if I insert, what happens is you get to select these now one by one. So the title is sorghum roti. And so I have to position this onto the sorghum roti and then enter. Where's the next information? Add description. Here we go. So sorghum is a gluten-free alternative to wheat that is especially important and supportive for kapha. Then I'm going to add the ingredients. And so here I'm going to just highlight over the ingredient section as well as the equipment. Then I'm going to add the instructions. So you see how this works. It's a little bit manual, but it does capture everything. It reads the information. And then you hit this button on the lower right, scan. And you will see that it shows up in exactly the same wonderful format, the description, the name, the ingredients, the instructions. And you can change anything here that you want to change and then save. And you will see there it is. And in the image place, you have the original PDF. How cool is that? So this is a wonderful feature that you can add images from JPEGs or PDFs. And what I really love about this platform is that you can edit any section. So right here, look, edit. I can change anything. Oh, there was a mistake. No problem. Just add it in and save. So if you want to make notes after you made the recipe, if you want to make substitutions, if you want to delete ingredients because they don't work for you, you can do all of that stuff. So that is really, really a great feature. I love that feature. Okay, so I've showed you now sort of the main ways of adding recipes. The next thing is let's look at view recipes. So go to my recipes. And now you can see the list of all the recipes that you have included in Cookbook. And notice at the top, there's tags. So soup. So if I want to see all my soup recipes, here they are. If I want to see my meat-based recipes, here they are. Here's my protein recipes. Now, this is filtering for all three. So you need to clear the filter, clear these search options, and start again. I want to see my protein recipes. There we go. So meat and soup means that protein is also selected for this and for this. And then exit out. Okay, and if you just want to search for something, you can do that here. Search by keyword. Cauliflower. That's the one we just entered, right? There's two with cauliflower. Awesome. So I love this. This feature is wonderful. You can also create favorites. So if I wanted to favorite this one, where would I do it? That's in the edit. So I believe the favorites happen in edit. So if I turn this on to favorite and save, now if I go to my favorites, there it is. So that's awesome. So what you can use this feature for is the recipes you've cooked, the recipes you love, actually, there is a feature to after you complete a recipe to say you cooked it. That's also there. But you can also use this favorites if you already know that you like it. So this is very helpful. Let's see. So when you're viewing recipes, you can also see them in a different way. That's something I wanted to show you. Let's see my recipes. So right here under display, you can change the display. So maybe this is a nicer view. I kind of like that view there. And then you just change it back this way. More information in this list view versus this grid view. But that's pretty awesome. All right. So next thing is, how do I create a meal plan? So let's select this recipe here. And let's plan. You see this feature right here, plan. So I want to make this, what day is it? The 12th of July. I want to make this on Sunday. And there we go. Now it asks you to determine what meal do I want this for? Let's say dinner. There we go. Dinner for servings. Enter recipe notes. So it gives you a chance to actually add notes right here, which is amazing. Safe. Okay. So now we want to see that meal plan. So we're going to go over to the left here to meal planner. And now we can see that we have meals planned on the 12th and on the 16th. And the 12th is highlighted because that's the current day. And it's showing down below here, starting on the 12th. Actually, if you click on the 12th, okay. If I click on the 6th, it's going to show from the 6th. If I click on the 12th, it's showing from the 12th. And what's amazing here is that you can create a shopping list. And it says, which timeline, which duration do you want your shopping list for? And so I'm saying Monday, the 10th to the 16th, that's the current week. And look, you can actually add in extra items like popcorn and salt and pepper chips. Save. Get grocery list. Look at that. And you can go through and go, well, I already have this. I already have, or I don't need to buy that. I already have this. I already have that. And then when you're ready, share and create PDF. So you can create a PDF out of your shopping list and it's going to look just like this. Isn't that awesome? Especially the fact that you can add your own items into your shopping list. I love that. And by the way, you can also turn an individual recipe into a PDF. So speaking of PDFs, so look at this beautiful formatting of this creamy potato soup that includes zucchini and celery. In addition to the potatoes, look at that beautiful formatting. This is really, really nice. All the information that you need. And you can also print your meal planner. Look at that. Look, you can print this off, put notes in here. This is brilliant. So nice. So nice for the formatting. I love this. Okay, so next thing to cover is what do we want to do when it's actually time to cook? So we're going to open up a recipe. And at this point, we want to make this recipe. And so what we're going to do is click start. Okay, so over on the right hand side, it's showing you all the ingredients that you need. And it's very nicely shown, right? And after you've got that ingredient out, you can click it. So after you've prepared all the ingredients, or not, or maybe it's not after, maybe whenever you're ready, click on this little arrow here. This is very important to note this arrow. Click there. And it's going to give you the first instruction. And what's amazing, and I think this might be really helpful when you have this in your kitchen and you're cooking, is to click on this arrow. I don't know if you could hear that, but the arrow is actually reading out the instruction. So I think that's really handy. And then you can go to the next instruction and the next and so on. Back. So we finished cooking the recipe. And now here's where you get to say cooked. Cooked. I made it. Would you like to mark the recipe with stars? Five stars. Yes. And safe. So these are the recipes that I have cooked. Isn't that awesome? But one feature I wanted to show you too, deciding what to cook, was the surprise me feature. I really like this. It's showing you one of your recipes. And so if you don't want to make a decision, just choose surprise me and open. And there it is, right? Or go back to surprise me and go next. No, I don't want that one. Until you find one that you actually want to cook and then open. Isn't that nice? It kind of takes decision making out of the equation. I love that. All right. So we're almost getting to the end, but there's a couple really important things that I still want to show you. So here is the settings. So I'm down very low and I'm going to settings. And here's where you can change app theme, your default yield. So if you want to change, you know, from four to two, then the recipes will adjust. I believe the app will change the recipe ingredients so that your yield is two or more. Your type of conversion, your grocery format, etc. The way you like things displayed. You can make changes here. And then very important is this topic of sharing recipes. Now, I already showed you that you can create a PDF and you can share that, but you can also share in what's called a CB file format. And a CB file format is a format that can be recognized by other cookbook users. And so it's just a, you know, it's like a JPEG or it's like a PDF, except that it's a dot CB. And this app, if we go back to a single recipe, if we go to share, we can create the PDF here or we can send a CB user. And this is going to download a CB file onto your computer and then you can send it to a friend or somebody in your group or program who has this app and they can just import it and open it up. Now to import, it's actually a little bit tricky, but I did find it. You need to go to import.cookbookmanager.com and then you select cookbook here. So you can import from other apps as well. There's some other apps here that people use. But here you would go to cookbook and then upload your zip file, your collection of recipes. And this is really, really cool because like I said, an entire cookbook can be shared with you. And as an Ayurveda nutritionist, I love the fact that I can create a set of recipes designed specifically for my client that they can then import with a couple clicks and have all those recipes available to meal plan with. And those are the perfect recipes for them. So that's what I'm going to use this for. And so import.cookbookmanager.com, this is a new feature. You can see here it says beta release, but this is an awesome feature. Now, I have another awesome feature to tell you about actually. And that is there is an app for Android or Apple for cookbook. And what I've been showing you is the desktop. So that means you can have the same information on your desktop as you have in your app. And this is brilliant. It syncs because you log in in both places. And so all the information that you added on your desktop comes into your app. So now you can take your phone or your iPad into the kitchen and cook with it there and make changes there, and then it'll show up on your desktop. That is amazing. So in conclusion, overall, I really like this tool, and especially because it gives us the maximum control over our recipes. It's so easy to edit the recipes to your liking at any time. And the fact that you can copy and paste blocks of content and it doesn't force you to enter each ingredient separately is really amazing. So remember here under add a recipe, new blank recipe. So you can just list, you can put your list of ingredients here. Now, to show you the difference, look at my website, which is goodgutayurveda.com. When I enter a recipe here, I have to enter the name, the summary, the servings, the prep time, the cook time, the course, cuisine, keywords, and then the equipment, one name, notes, the ingredients, one unit, name, notes for every separate ingredient line. Same thing with instructions. So it's a lot of work to enter all this information individually. And that's why I was so thrilled that you can just copy paste an entire section of ingredients and cookbook will format it for you. This is so amazing. So I also enjoy that there are so many ways to import recipes and ways to tag and sort your recipes. Where is that? Go to the app, go to my recipes. Remember all these tags. Remember these different ways of seeing them. I love that you can create your own cookbook like the sections in the cookbook in the way that makes sense to you. I also love that cookbook allows you to share an entire recipe book with another person because this is going to be really helpful for me as an Ayurvedic nutritionist. Any nutritionist would find this a helpful feature. And if people in your community are using this tool, then they can receive the recipes and they can share recipe finds with each other using the cookbook export setting. So the last thing that I love is that this app generously allows up to 40 recipes for free with all the functionality of the app in that free plan. And if you want more than that, it's just a $1.40 per month minimum up to $40 for a lifetime access. And I think that that is super reasonable for such a well-designed and supported app. And all you need to do is go to cookbookmanager.com and open a free account to get started. Thanks for watching. I hope that this is a solution that can allow you to choose your favorite recipes that really work for you and your family and do meal planning. I think that this is the most flexible, customizable, ideal solution for everyone. Super easy to use and you can do this. That's it for today. Bye for now.