Does anyone know of any good (preferably free) recipe management software?

I wish. My friend has one she really likes, but I can't remember the name of it. I will ask her.

I was actually just thinking of this the other day. With technology what it is now, how far away are we from having one of those fold down mini LCD screens in the kitchen that is also touch capable. We can just whip that sucker down, touch the ingredients we don't have, print up a shopping list, and when we get back, just glance over at the monitor for directions. How cool?

You guys are barking up the wrong tree. It's about soul. Not an LCD screen.

Shaddap and cook already!

I use two products for my recipe management... The one I use the MOST and can recommend without reservation is called AccuChef. I like it a lot and it handles my giant recipe collection (over 23600 recipes) extremely well. It's solid, reliable, and has lots of features.

The other software I use -- and really want to like -- is Living Cookbook. Living Cookbook is a database-based solution (as opposed to AccuChef, which is flat-file). It has many nice features, but does not handle my giant collection very well (though it has improved significantly since previous versions). If you have a smaller recipe collection (and who doesn't?!) than mine, you would do well to consider this program.

Neither are free (and neither are particularly expensive); I've never seen a free recipe managment package that I liked. Both offer trial versions, so check them both out.

yeah, I agree. AccuChef is better than all others (and there are tons of them NYC, BigOven and others). If you are going to buy it (and you will if you try), go to price comparison websites - Deprice, Froogle, PriceGrabber, Shopping.Com, Kelkoo.Co.Uk.
I got mine at 10% off http://www.deprice.com/accuchef.htm so there are good deals out there. Maybe even eBay

im wondering if the best solution would be to design your own database.
at its most basic level, filemaker pro is easy to use and you could design it to be just about anything you wanted it to be. you could use any search criteria you desired. i would look at trial offers of the recipe databases and take the best from those.
i have been thinking of doing this for a while but i have other databases i am working on before i start one for recipes.
just a thought,
d

Actually, that thought crossed my mind as well (and my thought was to use FileMaker for it too!).

I decided against it because a> there are other software packages that are much further along than if I tried re-inventing the wheel, b> the others have killer features that would be difficult to implement in FileMaker, and c> the others are not expensive...

Those are the issues that leap to my pre-caffienated mind.