I’ve been playing with the Magick Menu this weekend. And loving it!
My background makes me predisposed to love this new service being rolled out by Natalie Lussier a.k.a. The Raw Foods Witch. I love raw food. I love databases (part of my day job). The Magick Menu marries a database of raw food recipes with an intuitive user interface for quickly selecting a week’s meals and generating a shopping list. It’s all my favorite things! How awesome is that?
I signed up for a free trial week. And got too busy to test it. I saw my card charged auto-renew when the trial ended. Oops. I decided to keep it for a month and prioritize making time to use it. The lovely wife is training for a 150 mile ride in Death Valley at the end of the month. And she’s very interested in powering her training with green juices for her final weeks of training & tapering. I would like for us to do a 5 day green-drinks challenge. Opportunity is knocking to see how the tool holds up to managing a 2-person 5 day green liquids diet challenge.
This afternoon I began planning. I logged into my Magick Menu account, and started poking around. The site is WordPress driven so it has robust open source software back-end. Another bonus! I am ardent supporter of Open Source software and regularly make use of it as a matter professional principle. My day-gig involves managing a team administering the Open Source ePrints repository for a major research university
I found it very easy to find recipes, drag and drop them onto a weekly schedule, save the menu to my account library (cool! save even more time by re-using), and print out a shopping list of ingredients . The best part was saving to PDF. The PDF is rendering in a simple, easily printable form which won’t drain my paper & toner reserves. The layout is a plain menu grid at the top of the page, then a bullet-point shopping list, and, best of all, the full recipes for the week. I made a menu of green juices & smoothies, plus some heavily green raw veggie soups.
I spoke to the wife, and she’s good to go with the juicing. We need to do the grocery run, and make juices in the evening for the following day. I don’t know if we’ll start tomorrow or Tuesday. We have Superbowl social obligations today and time may not allow for shopping and juicing today.
You can contribute your own recipes to the Magick Menu data set and comment/review on recipes added by others. There aren’t a lot of recipes in the library yet. That’s not a totally bad thing. Browsing is easier with less recipes to look at. I can imaging spending a lot of time surfing recipes once a critical mass of recipes is available – they will look so yummy that I’ll get happily lost in the food-porn. The number of recipes will only get bigger once more people join the community and begin contributing.
I haven’t added any of my own recipes yet. There is a form-based interface for typing in your information. It accepts simple text and some HTML tags. You use pull-down menus to do some basic social tagging. The nerd in me ponders if the The Raw Food Witch has plans for optimizing tags. I think about how social tags are combined with controlled vocabularies to optimize search engine results. The search engine appears to be keyword full text indexing based. I can’t tell if it includes any sort of ranking in the results set displayed. There isn’t any advanced search available. As the corpus increases, it would be rad to customize your recipe searches based on indexes of controlled fields. Sorry…geeking out there….
What I would love is a batch ingest function so I could import all of my MacGoumet recipes. I’m a lazy data entry girl.
I’ve got my shopping list and menu in-hand. Now what I need to test is my ability to apply the tool at hand. It’s one thing to plan, it’s another to do. If this menu helps me stick to a juice fast for 5 days I’ll be a total convert. I’ll keep you posted.
