About MacMenu

Recipes

Everyone who learns to cook starts by reading recipes.  We find them and if they sound good, we follow them and taste the results.  If we would like to have them again, we "collect" the recipe.  I don't know anyone who cooks who doesn't have a collection of recipes.

Steph and I have been together for 50 years now, which means that we may have had as many as 50,000 meals together!  Even considering that many of them are repeats, that's still a lot of recipes to consider collecting.  With all that exposure, we have saved only a thousand recipes.  In other words, most of the meals that we have had (I'm sure like most people) don't rise to the level where you want to preserve the recipe to make sure that you can have that food again.

In our case, we rate food out of 10.  We rarely save a recipe unless it is at least a "7", although these days, we don't record a new recipe unless it is an "8" or better.  It is only the "10"s that we publish online (about 400).

MacMenu recipes are in virtually every category that a cook might need.  Since our personal food preferences favour savoury over sweet, there is an abundance of appetizer recipes and few dessert recipes.  As well, we prefer wine over spirits, so there are only a few mixed drink recipes but wine pairing suggestions with many main course items.

Right to Publish

As your cooking skills improve, you find yourself "tweaking" the recipe to be more to your liking.  I would classify Steph and myself as fairly major tweakers who, once in a while actually create a new recipe of our own.  However, most of the recipes in MacMenu are based to a small or large degree on a source recipe that could have come from another person, a newspaper, book, or magazine.

The literature is vague about what rights an individual has to publish material that is not totally his own, although it appears from my reading that with respect to recipes, it is only the explanation which could be "owned". 

Although there are very few recipes (if any) in MacMenu that are verbatim from another source, if anyone feels that we have published their product, please let us know and I will remove it.

Where a friend had provided us with a favourite recipe, we have acknowledged that in the recipe.

MacMenu Development

I developed my first Menu/recipe system in the 1980's on a MacIntosh, hence the name MacMenu.  Our 20 year old card file collection was used to populate that first data base.  When I moved from the Mac world to a PC, I redeveloped it twice, the latest version based on Microsoft's Access. 

In 2005, because our friends and family were often asking for recipes, I decided to publish the best recipes in MacMenu on our personal  website, which is also a place to go if you would like to know more about Ian and Steph Smith and family.