[brianogilvie]

I think it's helpful to distinguish menus from shopping lists from recipes. Steve's lists look like shopping lists of ingredients to me; their contexts are the places you buy the ingredients for each dish. That seems like a good use of OF; the only catch is having to do the math when your shopping list includes several versions of the same ingredients. (One dish calls for 2 apples, another for 3; OF is not going to figure out that you need 5 apples.)

Menus are a combination of dishes (in most cases, except for one-dish meals). That doesn't seem to be what Steve proposes. I'd have a salad before or after the mac & cheese, for instance; the two together would be a simple menu. And while you could do a recipe in OF, I think it's easier just to use paper (and less likely to result in an unfortunate meeting of computer and ingredients). But there's no reason in principle you couldn't do shopping list (action group), recipe steps (action group), dishes (action group or project) and full-fledged menus (project or folder) in OF. Keep them all in an inactive folder and drag copies into an active folder when you want to make them.

The main problem I see is that it would discourage you from trying new dishes because you'd need to enter the data for them. That's what has kept me from trying a computerized recipe database. I like trying new recipes and find that sitting down next to my cookbooks, planning my weekly menus and drawing up a shopping list by hand, on paper, and then going to the grocery is the most efficient use of my time. I will use OF to jot down ingredients that I realize that I need in between weekly shopping trips.