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| Bon Appétit |
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Reviews August 2004 • Vol.15 Issue 8 Page(s) 18-20 in print issue |
Bon Appétit Turn Your PC Into A Master Cookbook | ||
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As the saying goes, if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen . . . and onto the computer? OK, so that's not how the saying goes, but what's hot in food preparation these days isn't in the kitchen; it's wherever you keep your PC. Say good-bye to batter-spattered cookbooks with missing pages and say hello to the hottest innovations in cookbooks: cooking and recipe software. Cooking apps take recipe folders to a new level. They store family recipes, add new ones, and let you more easily manage your recipes. Cooking apps help with menu planning, shopping lists, and nutritional information. To aid you in choosing a program that works best with your PC and your kitchen, here's a rundown of four popular programs.  The Four Entrees Dozens of quality cooking applications are on the market today. It was a difficult decision, but we ultimately narrowed the list down to four that offer useful features and options. We considered many criteria in evaluating each program, with the focus being on ease of use and product features. We installed each program on a Windows XP machine with a 1.28GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor, 128MB of RAM, and approximately 65GB of free hard drive space. This PC met the minimum system requirements of every program we tested.  Cookbook Wizard For Windows 2.0 $17.95 (download); $23.95 (CD) MicroBlast Software http://www.cookbookwizard.com If ease of use is high on your priority list when shopping for cooking applications, Cookbook Wizard is a must-see. The intuitive interface is easy to work with from the get-go, with basic commands at the top and tabs denoting important sections just beneath them. For instance, you can click a tab to browse recipes by cuisine (Caribbean Pork Roast or Asian Noodle Salad, anyone?) or category, such as dairy or seafood. You can cut down on shopping trips by using the search engine to look for recipes that contain ingredients you have at home or to reject recipes that contain ingredients you or someone else may be allergic to. And the software gives you multiple display options, such as Display Recipes By Entry Date or Display Duplicate Recipe Names, which make it easy to view the software's contents. Cookbook Wizard comes with about 700 recipes, beginning with Angel Shrimp Scampi and ending with Zucchini Soup. Each recipe is organized by information fields, and you can tell at a glance the main ingredient, the number of servings, the preparation method, the preparation time, the type of cuisine, the food group, the difficulty level, the food temperature, and other factors. Select a recipe, and its individual card lists ingredients and instructions and allows you to add your own comments. Manually add your own recipes or import them from other sources, including tens of thousands of recipes on the Cookbook Wizard Web site. Many of the recipes include nutritional information. Dieters will be happy to discover the Asparagus Soup has only 90 calories per serving, as well as four grams of protein and 12% of the USDA's recommended allowance of vitamins A and C. Sounds good, but wait a minute. Don't have any asparagus in the house? Add it to the shopping list with two button clicks. Cookbook Wizard builds a shopping list from recipes or general items you add, and the software automatically saves lists. Use the Print command to print your shopping list or use it to print recipes to assemble into a hard-copy cookbook. Cookbook Wizard includes a virtual spice rack. Select a spice name and see a list of foods that contain that spice or select a recipe and view the spices it contains. The software also features a glossary, where you can learn Little Miss Muffet was really eating a coagulation of milk- or egg-based foods resulting from their separation into a watery liquid and clumps of semisolid material. (Yum!) Cookbook Wizard requires Windows 9x/NT 4.0/2000/Me/XP. Download a free 30-day trial on the Web site.  Cook'n With Betty Crocker $29.95 (CD) DVO Enterprises (801) 492-1290 http://www.dvo.com Cook'n With Betty Crocker is just one in a series of titles in the Cook'n line. DVO Enterprises claims Cook'n is the best-selling recipe software today, and while we can't independently verify that claim, we certainly understand why the software is so popular. Photographs and video clips, a monthly e-newsletter for registered users, and a personal email invitation from the company president to telephone him are just some of the reasons why. The software seems to have a personality, as you'll see as soon as you launch it. A nearly full-page color photo appears with simple menu commands and tabs (Recipes, Menu, Planner, List, Foods, and more) at the top. Video tips appear at start up, and they show you useful tricks such as how to measure spaghetti (fill a circle with your thumb and forefinger for about two servings) and how to crack an egg (break it on the counter before adding it to other ingredients to avoid eggshells in food). Cook'n With Betty Crocker includes about 1,000 recipes from, not surprisingly, "Betty Crocker's Cookbook." You can browse, search, delete, edit, copy, create, and categorize them, and most of the recipes include mouthwatering photographs. Plus, a select few include how-to videos. For example, before making the Cheesy Bacon Quiche, click the Play Video button to watch an expert create a Bisquick crust. Add your own recipes, automatically adjust serving sizes, print recipes onto cards, or send them via email to friends and family. One of the software's strengths lies in its meal- and menu-planning features. You can create weekly menus by simply dragging meals or recipes to the weekly menu list. If you're more ambitious, create a yearlong menu. Use these menus or individual recipes to create shopping lists, which you can print or download to a Palm-based handheld device. Plus, the shopping assistant can group items by grocery story aisle and calculate the approximate cost of your shopping list. Notable Cook'n With Betty Crocker features include a personal home nutritionist that analyzes nutritional elements of recipes and brand comparison of ingredients. Cook'n titles require Win9x/NT 4.0/2000/Me/XP, 8MB RAM, 10MB hard drive space, and a CD-ROM drive. After purchasing one of the basic titles via download or CD (we recommend the CD because the download version does not include photos or video clips), you can supplement by downloading additional recipe sets for a fee. The online Cook'n wizard will guide you through the purchasing process.  Living Cookbook $29.95 Radium Technologies info@RadiumTechnologies.com http://www.livingcookbook.com We don't know why the company called it Living Cookbook, but the name may reflect the community of users. Log on to the Living Cookbook Web site, and you'll find thousands of involved users exchanging recipes, tips, techniques, and more. And what makes so many people interested in this software? We're betting it's the wide range of features and  easy-to-use interface. Let's start with the heart of any cookbook software program: the recipes. When you first install the software, you'll have about 200 Quick And Easy recipes, with photos and detailed descriptions, and you can add hundreds of others from your own collection, import them from other programs, or copy them from Web sites. Download free cookbooks, such as the Diabetic Recipes or Special Occasion cookbooks, from the Living Cookbook Web site, along with hundreds of thousands of recipes in the user forums. Search recipes by name, ingredient, recipe type, or keyword. Automatically scale recipes; convert ingredients; and customize layout, fonts, and formatting. The company is also planning a companion Web site that will allow users to download even more free recipes. Obtain more detailed information about recipes, thanks to the nutrition calculator. This tool calculates the nutritional value of ingredients, recipes, meals, and menus (yes, the software allows you to easily plan meals and menus). And you'll learn, for example, the Herbed Chèvre Spread contains only 45 calories, but its 1.72 grams of saturated fat is 9% of the USDA's recommended daily value. The spread contains a clove of garlic, and if you click its listing, you'll be swept to the garlic page. Did you know that along with onion, garlic was fed to thousands workers engaged in building the great pyramid of Cheops? That's just one of the many interesting facts you'll find in the ingredient database. The database covers more than 6,000 ingredients, including a detailed nutritional analysis of each one. Learn more about cooking by visiting the Cooking Reference Library, the section of the software that serves up glossary listings and cooking techniques. Other tools Living Cookbook carries include a database backup, unit converter, Web site database, and various display options. We don't want to overlook two important components of the software: the grocery list features and the cookbook publishing. Create shopping lists, recipe cards, and even entire cookbooks with just a few mouse clicks and a printer. If you run into any technical difficulties, the help file has more than 300 topics, and the online community forums are active. Living Cookbook's system requirements include Win9x/NT 4.0/2000/ Me/XP and 45 MB hard drive space. Upgrades are free.  Now You're Cooking! $25 (CD; $30 includes any upgrades) Loginetics sales@ffts.com http://www.ffts.com If you're comfortable using PC shareware, this may be the program for you. The program and its Web site have a sparse feel, but don't let the lack of photos or fancy tutorials turn you away. The Now You're Cooking (NYC) software does what it intends to do—provide you with an easy way to manage recipes, meal planning, shopping lists, and more—and it does it well. Let's look at the recipe-related features. NYC starts with just a few recipes, but you can download more than 158,000 free recipes from the Web site. Organize them into an unlimited number of cookbooks, create and edit category listings, search recipes on a range of criteria, mark recipes for future reference, check for duplicate recipes, resize them by multiples or serving sizes, and export them to text files. NYC doesn't stop there. It includes a number of meal-planning features, such as the ability to create multiple menus across multiple cookbooks, use a pop-up calendar, and create a shopping list from a meal plan. The shopping list is also easy to use, with the ability to add or delete items, convert from fractions to decimals, sort by grocery store aisle, and even look for coupons you have stored on your PC. The nutrition database, which contains more than 6,200 items, provides analysis on recipes, meals, and menus, and it can analyze any recipe from any source. And NYC's cost-management features, including the shopping list cost comparison for multiple stores, can save shoppers money. NYC lets you print almost any information in the program. NYC's system requirements include Win9x/NT/2000/Me/XP. And Now, For Dessert Each of the programs we reviewed impressed us—each had useful features and was relatively easy to learn. We appreciated the huge database of recipes NYC offers, Cookbook Wizard's easy-to-use interface, and the helpful personality of Cook'n With Betty Crocker. We balanced the cost, features, and interface and decided on Living Cookbook as this month's Smart Choice.  by Heidi V. Anderson
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