Under the blog entry "My Vitamin Intake For The Day" I got this question from a poster with the great screen name "nopancakesplease": What is a MasterCook and where can I get one?

MasterCook is the recipe program I've been using for the better part of a decade, and I quite frankly couldn't have written all those books without it. Well, I could have, but I wouldn't have had the faintest idea what the carb, protein, fiber, and calorie counts were.

I have the low carb edition of MasterCook, which I'm not sure is available anymore. Doesn't matter; that refers only to the recipes pre-loaded in the program, none of which I've ever used. The reason I use MasterCook is it allows me to create my own recipes and organize them into my own cookbooks. I enter the ingredients and the quantities used of each, tell the program how many servings the recipe makes, click a button, and it spits out a full nutritional breakdown for each serving. I can easily change quantities of a given ingredient, or change to a different to see how the change affects the nutritional breakdown. If I want to create a variant of a recipe, I can do a "save as" with the original recipe, change the name, and just alter the ingredients necessary.

MasterCook comes with a huge database of ingredients and their nutritional breakdowns pre-loaded. However, using, as I do, some unusual ingredients, I greatly value the fact that MasterCook lets me add ingredients to that database; I've added dozens over the years, from vanilla whey protein powder to sugar-free dark chocolate. I also can alter the nutrition stats for the pre-loaded ingredients. Why would I do this? If I regularly use a brand that has notably different stats than MasterCook shows, I'll change it. (I also have changed my program's carb count for plain yogurt. The "official" carb count for plain yogurt is 12 grams per cup, but that's simply wrong. 12 grams is the carb count for a cup of milk, but most of that lactose is digested by the yogurt bacteria and converted into lactic acid, giving yogurt its characteristically tangy flavor. How much lactose is left depends on how long the yogurt is incubated; I entered 4 grams per cup as a pretty safe average.)

Another great function of MasterCook is the ability to scale recipes. Have a recipe that makes 8 servings and you only want to make 6? MasterCook will figure out how much you need of each ingredient, though it won't change your pan size or oven time; that you have to figure out for yourself. Oh, and if you, like me, use parts of one of your recipes in another of your recipes -- for instance, I've used my no-sugar-added ketchup in dozens of recipes -- MasterCook will let you embed one recipe in another, and will read the nutrition counts for both.

I have also long used MasterCook as a way to keep track of daily nutritional intake. I have "cookbook" that's just a list of what I ate each day. I just enter what I eat as "ingredients" and analyze the whole day as "one serving." That's how I came up with the nutrition stats in the "My Vitamin Intake For the Day" article.

MasterCook also has features I haven't even used, like the ability to create grocery lists.

I have no idea if MasterCook is the "best" recipe management software out there, since it's the only one I've used. I just know it's been hugely valuable to me, and I haven't had any urge to replace it, though I did once upgrade to a newer version. I got mine at Amazon.com, and they still carry it, though it's not the low carb version.

So that's what a "MasterCook" is, and where you can get one.