A GOURMET CD TO TICKLE YOUR PALATE!
A Review of Great Gourmet
by Susan Davis
With the flood of multimedia CD-ROMs available these days, it would be
easy for the few quality titles to get lost in the shuffle. Great
Gourmet by Expert Software is more than just another copy-cat recipe
program trying to undercut the higher priced, higher visibility
programs on the market. Great Gourmet has all the quality of a
seven-course restaurant meal, but offered at a price even a budget
gourmet would jump at. Great Gourmet is caviar tucked away in a tuna
fish can.
The packaging is nothing special to look at, and your first impression
as you open the CD-ROM is that this is truly a budget program. The
type you buy because you can't justify the price on the really neat
looking program farther over on the shelf. But once you take a few
moments to run the exceptionally easy Install routine and open this
program, the budget label in your brain vanishes forever, and you'll
never look at those other programs again.
The first thing that you realize as you look at Great Gourmet is how
easy the interface is to handle. You probably won't even get around to
looking at the manual (and it's a nice one, although small), because
it's too easy to jump in and start exploring the recipes with the
well-labeled icons for Back, Print, Shopping, Meal Plans, Recipe
Contents and so on.
Speaking of recipes, you'll be amazed in that respect, too. Great
Gourmet boasts of over 10,000 recipes, and it's no empty brag. And
we're not talking about seventeen recipes for chicken soup, either.
With dozens of cookbooks to choose from, and a wide range of
categories in each one, you have a marvelous blend of homey and
gourmet recipes compiled together. If you've always wanted to try a
new recipe for Taco Dip, Great Gourmet has one. And if you've ever
dreamed of cooking dinners that sound as good as they taste, you could
try Heavenly Bangkok Chicken or Bird of Paradise. For chocoholics, the
chocolate cookbook will keep you engrossed for weeks on end with
delicacies like Marvelous Mocha Brownies or Sex in a Pan.
If the recipes alone aren't enough to make you drool, the pictures
that accompany many of them are bound to push you over the edge. I
installed Great Gourmet right after a big dinner, and my mind was far
from food, but ten minutes with those pictures, and I wanted to rush
back into the kitchen and start cooking up a storm. For those you
interested in cooking from a more healthy perspective, Great Gourmet
will have its hooks in you, too. The nutritional information and
analysis, available by either graph or numerical data, is at least as
good as what I've seen in programs like MasterCook II, and much better
than some other programs I've sampled.
Like some of the more expensive recipe programs, you have a variety of
options available to you. You can enter new recipes into cookbooks,
and mix and match recipes from one cookbook into another. You can edit
recipes, and you can print recipe cards or shopping lists for recipes.
You can even scale the recipe to fit your own needs. The meal planning
feature is slick, too, and the sorting features for the recipe lists
are more varied than any I've ever seen before.
You can sort by
everything from name, to total calories, to percentage of the recipe
calories from fat, to the amount of cholesterol or sodium in the
recipe. You can even sort them out by the time it takes to make the
recipe, or the prep time involved. And, if you already have an
investment in another recipe program that you want to switch from, the
Import and Export features in Great Gourmet are quite extensive for a
budget program.
With all of the features available in Great Gourmet, it has the
capacity to tickle the palate of even the most demanding users. It's
easy to use, inexpensive, the content has all of the quality of a
five-star multimedia CD, and you get a menu of features that rivals
any cookbook program on the market. Plus, with such tantalizing
recipes and appetizing pictures of food, you'll soon be inspired to
create kitchen masterpieces that will have everyone you know asking
you for the recipe!
Multimedia Cafe Scorecard
Product:
Great Gourmet
Company:
Expert Software
800 Douglas Road
Coral Gables, FL 33134
(800) 759-2562
(305) 567-9990
(305) 569-1111 (FAX)
Cost:
$19.95
System Requirements:
PC-Compatible 386DX or higher,
running DOS 3.3 or higher
with Microsoft Windows 3.1 or higher,
4 MB RAM, 256-color VGA or SVGA, CD-ROM,
15 MB of hard drive space, and a Windows-supported mouse.
Breakdown:
Entertainment Value 4
Educational Value 4
Concept 4
Depth 5
Interface 5
Overall Score:
Copyright © 1997 InfoMedia, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.
With the flood of multimedia CD-ROMs available these days, it would be
easy for the few quality titles to get lost in the shuffle. Great
Gourmet by Expert Software is more than just another copy-cat recipe
program trying to undercut the higher priced, higher visibility
programs on the market. Great Gourmet has all the quality of a
seven-course restaurant meal, but offered at a price even a budget
gourmet would jump at. Great Gourmet is caviar tucked away in a tuna
fish can.
The first thing that you realize as you look at Great Gourmet is how
easy the interface is to handle. You probably won't even get around to
looking at the manual (and it's a nice one, although small), because
it's too easy to jump in and start exploring the recipes with the
well-labeled icons for Back, Print, Shopping, Meal Plans, Recipe
Contents and so on.
With dozens of cookbooks to choose from, and a wide range of
categories in each one, you have a marvelous blend of homey and
gourmet recipes compiled together. If you've always wanted to try a
new recipe for Taco Dip, Great Gourmet has one. And if you've ever
dreamed of cooking dinners that sound as good as they taste, you could
try Heavenly Bangkok Chicken or Bird of Paradise. For chocoholics, the
chocolate cookbook will keep you engrossed for weeks on end with
delicacies like Marvelous Mocha Brownies or Sex in a Pan.
If the recipes alone aren't enough to make you drool, the pictures
that accompany many of them are bound to push you over the edge. I
installed Great Gourmet right after a big dinner, and my mind was far
from food, but ten minutes with those pictures, and I wanted to rush
back into the kitchen and start cooking up a storm. For those you
interested in cooking from a more healthy perspective, Great Gourmet
will have its hooks in you, too. The nutritional information and
analysis, available by either graph or numerical data, is at least as
good as what I've seen in programs like MasterCook II, and much better
than some other programs I've sampled.
You can sort by
everything from name, to total calories, to percentage of the recipe
calories from fat, to the amount of cholesterol or sodium in the
recipe. You can even sort them out by the time it takes to make the
recipe, or the prep time involved. And, if you already have an
investment in another recipe program that you want to switch from, the
Import and Export features in Great Gourmet are quite extensive for a
budget program.
Multimedia Cafe Scorecard
| Product: |
Great Gourmet |
| Company: |
Expert Software
|
| Cost: |
$19.95 |
System Requirements:
running DOS 3.3 or higher
with Microsoft Windows 3.1 or higher,
4 MB RAM, 256-color VGA or SVGA, CD-ROM,
15 MB of hard drive space, and a Windows-supported mouse.
Breakdown:
Overall Score: