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 across the U.S. and Canada.Combined with the power of Cook'n software you can easily store your own recipes on your personal computer or instantly choose from over 600 award-winning Taste of Home recipes.Conveniently loaded with 500 photos of easy-to-fix recipes for main dishes soups salads side dishes desserts and more Cook'n with Taste of Home can plan complete family-sized meals or downsized for one or two...all served in 30 minutes or less.That means you can cook dishes with confidence. Forget running to a specialty store for goat cheese or sundried tomatoes; these recipies call only for ingredients you have right on hand. Also learn some of the "secret" ingredients that cooks add to make ordinary dishes outstanding!Get Cook'n with Taste of Home and enjoy this collection of family favorites.System Requirements:Pentium processor or better Windows 9x/2000/Me/NT/XP 8 MB RAM 2x CD-ROM drive 16 MB hard drive spaceFormat: WIN 9598MENT2000XP Genre: REFERENCE / LIFESTYLE Age: 615029000483 UPC: 615029000483 Manufacturer No: 0048

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1234 in Software
• Brand: DVO Enterprises
• Model: 48
• Released on: 2001-10-15
• Platforms: PDA, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows 98
• Format: CD-ROM
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds

Features

• 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

Amazon.com 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

Amazon.com Product Description
Cook'n with Taste of Home helps you create scrumptious family meals that are easy to make and nutritionally balanced to boot. It features 600 favorite recipes and 500 full-color photographs from Taste of Home magazine. You can also expand the Cook'n electronic cookbook by adding your own family recipes or downloading new ones from the Internet. Easy to use, this program is a real timesaver. Simply input the ingredients you have on hand, and Cook'n suggests a range of recipes. Its recipe manager makes entertaining a snap. Just enter the number of guests, and this clever program calculates the new ingredient amounts for you! Print recipes onto three-by-five cards right from your desktop, so your recipe box never becomes cluttered again. And, when it comes to sharing recipes, just e-mail them with ease.

Cook'n with Taste of Home adds a menu planner, grocery-shopping assistant, and home nutritionist. Build your own weekly and monthly menus. Learn techniques that save time. Compile your grocery list automatically with the handy shopping assistant; it organizes your list by aisle and estimates the cost, saving you time as well as watching out for your money. It even converts measures used in recipes to those used in the store, so you buy just the right sized can! Download your shopping list from Cook'n to your PalmPilot handheld for complete organization. A built-in database holds nutrition facts from the labels of 10,000 food products, so you can determine which products best meet your dietary needs. The home nutritionist also analyzes recipes and menus, including the ones you add!

Customer Reviews

The Best for entering your own recipes
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.

Some software bugs- but not bad
There are two reasons to buy recipe software. The first is for the recipes. I did not buy the software for the recipes and I have not tried any recipes. I bought it for the second reason: to manage my recipes using their software. Generally the software works and it is better than the old DOS based software that I have used for years. There are some problems:

1) When printing, you can not specify how many copies you want. Each time you print, you must go through the whole routine.

2) Once you assign a recipe to a category, it stays. As far as I can tell you can not unassign a category.

3) The documentation is poor. The user has to be willing to experiment to figure out how it works. For example, the "Close" button is really a "Save and Close". If you use the little x in the upper right hand corner, nothing is saved.

4) On my computer, the mouse is deactivated whenever a pop-up box appears. To get my mouse working again, I have to press the tab key. This is true for the print box, the intro box, the exit box, etc...

I e-mailed DVO about problems 2 and 4. For problem 2, I received no response (I sent 3 e-mails on this problem). On Problem 4, I received a prompt response requesting more information. I responded. I waited. After a couple of weeks, I was told that I my problem is unique. It might be my mouse driver. I downloaded a new mouse driver from Microsoft. No change. I have over fifty programs on my system. The only place this problem appears is on DVO software. I may have a system problem, but, something DVO is doing is contributing.

This software is better than my old software. The software does have some nice features such scaling the menu for the number of servings requested and allowing photographs to be attached to recipes. I will continue using it but I have not ceased looking for better program. Maybe DVO will read this and fix the weaknesses.

I never tried the software with my PDA since it does not work with Pocket PC's. It likes the Palm OS.

The menu planner seems to work.

NOTE:

After I posted this review, DVO sent me an e-mail on how to delete categories from recipes. It works, but the documention still is missing this piece of information.

Awesome Software
I purchased this software, just so I could download grocery lists into the palm for grocery store shopping. I soon discovered it could do much more for me. I am always asked by friends to write down my recipes...now, it's just a click away. No more looking for pen and paper and writing it a hundred times.
I can even print the recipes out using decorative cards. I finally have a recipe box that everything is a uniform size,legible, and decorative at the same time. I just can't say enough about this awesome software!