September-December 2016

 

Understanding NYC’s Auto-Menu Side Dish Selection

 

Each Auto-Menu main dish (i.e., recipes in your “am-“ categories) may have side dishes listed in the recipe directions under the heading “Auto-Menu Side Dishes:”.  Recipes considered as side dish candidates for NYC’s Auto-Menu are those recipes where a side dish name matches or is embedded in the recipe name. 

 

For example, if you have “Dumplings” listed as a side dish for a specific “am-dinner” recipe, then the following recipes in the open cookbook would be found as potential side dish candidates for that recipe:

 

            Special Dumplings

            Gourmet Dumplings

Twenty-Minute Dumplings

Dumplings and Red-Eye Gravy 

 

NYC (5.93+) now omits recipes with the string “ and “ just before the embedded side dish name.  This prevents the following two recipes from becoming side dish candidates.

 

Chicken and Dumplings

Beef Stew and Dumplings

 

Exact Match vs Embedded Side Dish Names

 

Embedded side dish names enable more variety in the side dish candidates, but it can backfire in certain cases, causing more complex sides to be candidates.  For example, the side “Corn Bread” may be embedded in dishes you don’t want as sides, such as “Corn Bread Beef Pie” and “Corn Bread Burger Bake”.   If you want to absolutely avoid such sides when you really only wanted “Corn Bread”, you can set NYC Auto-Menu to only consider recipes with names that exactly match the side dish name. 

 

To make NYC’s auto-menu only use recipe names that exactly match the side name (no embedded name allowed):

 

1.      Use Tools… Options… Meal Plan tab…

2.      Check “exact match only” in the Auto-Menu frame under Side Dish Candidates (default is unchecked, so recipe names with side dish names “embedded” are candidates)

 

 

For more on NYC’s Auto-Menu feature, see Creating Automated Menus

 

 


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