COOKING THE HEALTHY WAY
A Review of Better Homes and Gardens Healthy Cooking Deluxe
by Susan Davis
With the proliferation over the past year or so of cooking programs, I'd started to think that there was no way to differentiate yet another one. Better Homes and Gardens certainly tried to do so with its Healthy Cooking Deluxe CD-ROM. Unfortunately, it only had limited success.
I started by popping in the CD-ROM to install. To my great appreciation, Windows 95 found an automatic installation wizard on the program. Many of the programs I'd tried over the past year failed to do that, so I was grateful. The installation went smoothly, and the only thing I found particularly irritating was that you needed to install over 45MB of information on the hard drive in order to get what it called good performance. For a test, I installed the minimum installation, which many of us would probably prefer at only 4.5MB. The performance was sluggish in many parts of the program, which seemed inexcusable for a CD-ROM in today's market running on a Pentium 133 with 32MB of RAM in a 4x drive. The performance did improve with the in-depth installation, but the price in hard drive space was pretty steep. I also found myself frustrated with the fact that the program practically required you to shut down any other running programs to gain reasonable performance. In the past, I have usually reviewed programs with my word processor on, so I can take notes, but that significantly affected the performance, with recipes taking sometimes twice as long to load, or screens to switch to other screens.
My first look at the program didn't impress me too much. The pictures were minimal. While they were reasonably full-colored and taste-inspiring, the pictures were confined to a small corner of the screen, and hardly tempted me the way many other cooking programs have. The range of functions available in the program looked promising, but I really missed the mouthwatering pictures of other recipe or cooking programs.
I was, however, pleasantly surprised about the interface. It was particularly easy to use, and managed to create a whole new look and feel, while maintaining the functionality of the familiar slide-bar, point-and-click system. The program provided a series of clickable tabs on the upper and lower edges of the program, allowing you to move around in a way that reminded you of a personal information manager. Healthy Cooking Deluxe provided you with the usual search utility, but I was happy that the number of categories to search was tailored to the healthy mission. You could search by fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, fiber, or the usual prep time, calories, carbohydrates, or type of dish. As an added bonus, you could even search by ingredients, in case you had something you wanted to use up in the house, or you had a craving for something specific.
The main index had all the usual selections: meats, side dishes, vegetables, breads, salads, fish, appetizers, and so on. I was glad to see that it also added meatless main dishes for healthy cooking, and some breakfast and brunch choices that would help decrease the need for those high-fat meals so common in our cooking past. You also had the chance to search through the index by name, so you could find a specific recipe if you could remember its name.
The Current Recipe and My Recipe sections were pretty standard. They listed nutritional breakdowns, ingredients, and instructions. The instructions were geared towards the average cook, and not particularly detailed. However, if you had trouble, you could check out the glossary section or the video techniques section. Both allowed you to read or view information about techniques necessary for either the current recipe, or the entire collection of tips and glossary items. This dual interface mechanism was handy if you were stuck on how to prepare a turkey for stuffing, for example, or didn't know how to peel a tomato.
I found the video techniques fairly helpful, actually, and learned a lot more from them than from anything else in the program. The shopping list was pretty standard, but it had one benefit that I hadn't seen much in other programs. You could add multiple recipes to your list and do your shopping all at once. An on-line presence was also available, through CompuServe, but you'd have to sign up for, and keep, a CompuServe account to use it. I didn't want on-line functionality that bad, since I don't want to have a CompuServe account. Also, if you had other Multicom cookbooks, you could reinstall them and have access to the recipes through the search routine available in Healthy Cooking Deluxe.
The only other feature available, and the only one which really gave this program its "Healthy" feel, was the Meal Planner tab. You could send recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a week or a day to the planner, and it would tell you about the calories, fat, and sodium that these recipes contained. This would be helpful in planning a low-fat, or low-sodium, diet, but other than collected healthy recipes, this was the program's only concession to healthy cooking.
Nothing in the techniques was particularly focused on healthy preparation methods, or special low-fat substitutions. You could find healthy substitutions by looking for them, but nothing would point them out to you, and if you didn't recognize them for what they were, you'd be out of luck.
Overall, while I found this program interesting to use, and somewhat helpful, it only partially achieved the desired result of providing healthy cooking education and recipes. If you were already an accomplished ôhealthyö cooking expert, and you just wanted some more recipes, this would be a good place to go. If you wanted to learn healthy cooking, this would be a starting place, but definitely not the comprehensive guide you would need.
Multimedia Cafe Scorecard
| Product: |
Better Homes and Gardens Healthy Cooking Deluxe |
| Company: |
Multicom Publishing, Inc.
|
| Cost: |
$35.95 |
System Requirements:
MPC compliant, 486DX/33 or better, 8MB of RAM,
SVGA monitor with 256 colors, MPC-2 compatible CD-ROM (2x or better),
4.5MB to 45MB of HD space, MPC compatible audio board, mouse, DOS 5.0
or later, Windows 3.1 or higher (Win95 compatible), MSCDEX 2.2 or
later.
Breakdown:
Entertainment Value 2
Educational Value 4
Concept 3
Depth 3
Interface 4
Overall Score:
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