Cook'n with Taste of Home [Old Version]

by DVO Enterprises

Product 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

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B00005QI6M
• Item model number: 48
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 4, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,616 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #25 in Software > Home & Hobbies > Cooking & Health

Product Description

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

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 Rating:  UPC: 615029000483 Manufacturer No: 0048

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

118 of 124 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best for entering your own recipes, November 8, 2001

By 

Alan Larsen (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cook'n with Taste of Home [Old Version] (CD-ROM)

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.

79 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some software bugs- but not bad, January 2, 2003

By 

Philip J. Moore (Alma, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cook'n with Taste of Home [Old Version] (CD-ROM)

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.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome Software, February 24, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Cook'n with Taste of Home [Old Version] (CD-ROM)

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!