MacMenu Home Page

Ian and Steph Smith

Amateur cooks and food lovers - foodies to the core.  Ian and Steph live in the Fairwinds community of Nanoose Bay, BC.

MacMenu

We have been collecting recipes for 50 years.  Since neither of us have allergies and we like almost everything, our recipes are all over the map - literally.  We do have preferences though, so you'll find a lot of recipes from Italy but few from Northern Europe or Africa.  In the last ten years we have been leaning more toward the complex flavours of Asian food, especially those of Thailand and India.

We rate all of the recipes we find or create.  Our rating system is a scale of 1-10, although we actually save only 8 or better, which amounts to over a thousand recipes in our collection.

In 1985, when I bought my first computer, a MacIntosh desktop, I created a program I named "MacMenu" to manage them.  In 2005, I built our personal website and published our best recipes online for the first time.  In 2012, I built this website as a stand-alone, online recipe collection and named it "MacMenu Online", with the domain name "macmenu.ca. 

In 2016, to avoid the third re-write of MacMenu, I selected a commercial software program called "Paprika" to manage our recipes.  It required major changes to the MacMenu website and conversion of all of our recipes to a new format.  A lot of work but the result was worth it.  We think that you'll find the new MacMenu more attractive than the DIY version and, in addition, it has some very useful additional features.

Paprika is described in more detail on the Paprika page. 

Recipes

While desktop MacMenu houses all of our recipes, MacMenu Online contains only those which we consider the best; ie, those rated 10.  Paprika and other recipe sources typically use stars to rate their recipes and, so we have adopted the star system.  To us, 5 stars means "10", 4 stars is a "9", and so on.

Almost all of the recipes in the online MacMenu are rated 5 stars because, with only a few exceptions, we don't publish any that are rated lower.

MacMenu Online Structure

We have chosen the recipe categories in broad areas. Where we have sub-categories, I have set up sub-menu directories. Use the menu buttons on the left to navigate to the main Category page. That page will provide one or more links to scan the recipes.

Each recipe scan page contains recipes in alphabetical order and you can scan down or up by using the scroll bar on a computer or a finger swipe on your tablet.  The recipe title is a link to take you to the recipe in a web format so that you can download it with a recipe manager (Paprika or equivalent).  If you'd like to print the recipe, there is a Print button off to the right which provides the recipe in a printable format.

All underlined words and phrases are hyper-links and will take you to a more detailed description of that item.

Complements

Complements is a page for recipes that we have rated less than "10" that are required by one of our included recipes or menus or which we were asked to include.  These are included in alphabetical order and have a reference to the invoking recipe if there is one.