Cook'n with Taste of Home

Price: $15.56
  

Product Review
If you collect Junior League cookbooks and covet your yellowed recipe cards from Grandma, this might be the cooking program for you. Many of the 600 recipes in Cook'n with Taste of Home will bring back memories: green bean casserole, Jell-O salads, church supper hot dishes--they're all here. As the box says, "Forget running to a specialty store for goat cheese or sun-dried tomatoes, these recipes call only for ingredients you have right on hand." If you must have your feta, find another program. But if cheddar's OK by you, read on.

The recipes here are all family fare and comfort food; pot roast, Instant Party Potatoes, and a cake that actually has Coca-Cola among the ingredients were a few that caused flashbacks. Interestingly, we also found recipes for venison and pheasant--ingredients we don't usually "have right on hand."

This CD-ROM is easier to navigate than some of the other Cook'n titles, and the production quality of the tutorial videos sprinkled throughout the program is also improved. Cooks can adjust the main page to browse by category, ingredient, or photograph (500 out of 600 recipes have pictures). There are 10 chapters of recipes, which range from main dishes to soups to salads to desserts.

This program quickly jumps through all of the hoops we expect cooking CD-ROMs to manage: it adjusts serving sizes, compiles shopping lists and nutritional analysis charts from recipes, helps cooks find recipes based on what they have in the cupboard, and creates weekly, even yearly, menus for the ultra-organized. Recipes and shopping lists can be downloaded onto Palm Pilots, and old-fashioned folks can print these recipes on three-by-five cards (not provided with the program).

For truly nonintuitive cooks, this program will translate the recipe's required 2 cups of tomato sauce into the required number of cans you must buy, then give you a choice of whether you want to put Hunts, Progresso, or Classico on the list for when you swing by the store. We think this is a bit much: at some point, the anal-retentive capabilities of these cooking programs will bog cooks down just as much as sloppily filed index cards from Granny. We'd rather see more recipes and fewer brand names. --Anne Erickson

Product Description
If the simple-yet-scrumptious meals are the kind your family enjoys best here's a fail-proof recipe for cooking success: The Cook'n with Taste of Home CD. Since 1993 Taste of Home has attracted over 5 million subscribers making it America's #1 cooking magazine! A unique food magazine Taste of Home contains thousands of family favorite recipes contributed by readers from all acro



Reader Reviews
I thoroughly researched all of the cooking software products before I made my purchase. Sierra was the industry leader but I discovered that they have discontinued their MasterCook line. Their products do not work on Windows XP or Windows 2000. Several other products are from fly by night companies. Since I want to enter all of my own recipes, I wanted a product from a company that was going to be around for a while. That's why I was intrigued with DVO's Cook'n. DVO has been around for nine years and it looks like they will be here for a while longer too because cooking is all they do. Their product is everything I hoped it would be. There are a couple areas that can use improvement but over-all it's very solid. I found out that they offer free upgrades over the Internet every month. They take customer suggestions and make the software better and better each time. I can't complain about that! The price is right too. I am very happy with my purchase. Comment (1) | Permalink | (Report this)