FWIW, I use a simple format inspired by stuff like markdown. A Mail-like header for metadata, followed by optional headnotes, ingredients prefixed with "- ", a

FWIW, I use a simple format inspired by stuff like markdown. A Mail-like header for metadata, followed by optional headnotes, ingredients prefixed with "- ", and finally instructions. Example (hope this comes through ok): Title: Recipe Title Here Alternate: Alternate title here Category: Entree Flickr: 1234, 3204, 29384 Author: A U Thor Image: foo.jpg Some optional headnotes. Usually one paragraph. Additional paragraphs separated by newline. * Ingredient Heading - ingredients start with a dash - 1 cup milk - 1/2 small onion, chopped * Maybe another ingredient heading - 1 tsp another ingredient Instructions follow the ingredients, with blank lines separating the paragraphs. More instructions. I'm currently using these text files and a bunch of home-grown software. I started out with YummySoup, exporting to this text format by hitting their CoreData database with a little python app. (You need the .mom file in the app bundle to pull this off.) For my stuff, I got to define the format, so it's pretty simple to deal with. Stuff like mealmaster seems to vary widely in practice and is tricky to parse. I also allow headings in the instructions, too, so I do have to peek ahead to see if a starred line precedes an ingredient line or not.