
     Cooking With Windows :

     A Product Review:                  MICRO COOKBOOK FOR WINDOWS 4.0

                       (c)  1995 by Frank McGowan


  Almost 20 years ago, a very smart man who had founded a wildly successful
  computer company confronted the notion of the home computer.  The term
  personal computer hadn't come into common usage yet and our very bright
  gentleman is supposed to have said that he could see no reason why anyone
  would want such a thing. At the opposite end of the spectrum were those
  who championed the  home computer as a panacea, capable of freeing harried
  housewives/husbands from much drudgery associated with everyday living.
  One of the examples most often cited involved using the computer to keep
  track of one's favorite recipes.

  As anyone who's ever sat at a computer keyboard entering data for hours on
  end can understand, this idea didn't exactly zoom off the launch pad.
  Nevertheless, the idea of keeping recipes in a computer stayed alive, and
  over the past several years has shown up  in several offerings.  Recently,
  one of our friends gave us a copy of the version put out by Pinpoint
  Publishing: Micro Cookbook. While we have yet to try any of the recipes,
  and are therefore unable to say much about the quality of the results, I
  can say that the software and the user's guide deserve several stars.

  I believe that a bad manual can destroy an otherwise good piece of
  software. Man (person?) years of excellent software development can be wiped
  out by a hastily-produced, shabbily-written user guide. The Micro Cookbook's
  user guide is very well done. The manual manages to achieve the right level
  of user-friendliness without becoming treacly or insipid. It is organized
  sensibly, and is well indexed, despite entries, under A, for "About
  Cookbooks," "About Ingredients," "About Options," and "About Recipes". Does
  anyone ever look something up by searching for "about"?  The index contains
  pointers to significant information rather than being a mere compilation of
  every occurrence of key words and phrases, so you don't waste your time
  going to pages that have nothing to communicate. The writers also
  acknowledge the fact that the book may contain factual errors, owing to
  last-minute changes to the software that couldn't be reflected because of
  the lead-time required for printing.  Yet another argu nt in favor of
  on-line documentation!

  Still, one has to wonder why the manual tells you to install the software
  by invoking install, when the actual procedure is done via setup!  Surely
  this should have been settled early on in the development process.

  The software itself is just as nicely done.  Those of you with limited
  system resources will find that Micro Cookbook will not exert undue
  strain: it will run in as little as 2meg of RAM, and consumes only 5meg of
  disk space, a pittance compared to diskeaters like word processors and
  spreadsheets. Packaged with the program are a baker's dozen cookbooks,
  eleven of which are filled with upwards of one hundred recipes; one that
  contains tips on what foods go with other foods and how they can by used;
  and lastly, an empty cookbook where you can store your own favorites or
  those that have been passed down as part of your family heirlooms.

  The diversity among the cookbook choices is quite impressive. One is
  dedicated to vegetarian cooking, another to cooking with ingredients light
  on fat, etc. One recipe I mean to try very soon is "Grandpa Snub's Chile,"
  which looks downright ornery. One point I should make is that this came
  from a cookbook entitled America's Famous Name Foods. Yes,  this one does
  contain shameless plugs for brand-name products, but I'm willing to over
  look this when the McIlhenny Company (makers of Tabasco sauce) put out a
  recipe as enticing as this one!

  Another feature I was happy to find,  was the ability to search for
  recipes containing specific ingredients or categories of ingredients. So,if
  you've got some leftover Swiss cheese and want to use it up in an innovative
  way, you can go to Recipe on the menu bar, clicking Find Recipe, then
  choosing Basic Ingredients, cheese, aged and then click among the choices
  till you find the one that calls for Swiss cheese (I'll give you a hint:
  it's Chicken Cordon Bleu).

  Along with each recipe, you get nutrition facts, such as calorie count,
  saturated fat, protein, etc. along with suggestions on how you can cut
  back by substituting ingredients. The Surgeon General would be pleased. It
  was a bit surprising in a health-conscious product like this, to see an
  ingredient category for alcoholic beverages, containing 84 entries. But
  then, alcohol evaporates during the cooking process, so I guess there's no
  great harm.

  Overall, I rate this a very good product, especially for someone like
  myself, an admitted neophyte in the kitchen with no grand illusions about
  my ability as a chef: it lets me browse among a broad range of cuisines
  without annoying others with tedious questions, while absorbing vast
  amounts of cooking lore and piquing my interest in trying a few tentative
  experiments on the range. Best of all, I don't have to spend interminable
  hours watching cooking shows on television while I could be doing
  something more useful as in watching golf tournaments on television!

  Maybe these "home computers" are good for something after all. Still, it's
  hard to imagine that a 3.5-inch diskette will have quite the same
  nostalgic value as Grandma Barr's handwritten recipe book as it's passed
  from our generation to our grandchildren's.


  Frank McGowan spent 25 years as a computer documentation professional at
  Honeywell  and Digital Equipment Corporation. During that time he worked
  as a technical writer, taught technical writing, and managed a
  documentation department. Currently he works as an independent consultant
  in the Boston area and spends his spare time feeding two cats, honing his
  golf game and dabbling in music and writing fiction. Frank is a regular
  contributor to WindoWatch.







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