Software Review of:
Master Cook 
Cooking Light 

My dieting technique is to account for what we eat and to replace fast food with gourmet, low calorie food. Who needs Kentucky Fried Chicken when we can dine on Coq Au Vin at twice the taste and half the calories? John and I (he didn’t get a vote) both are following the Weight Watchers at Home program, and I decided to put technology to work in helping us both shed our excess pounds. One important component of our new lifestyle is MasterCook Cooking Light. It’s a great software program that makes it easy to plan, cook and account for your meals.

Cookbooks:
The program includes more than 1,400 healthy recipes from the 1996-1998 issues of Cooking Light magazine. You can add you own cookbooks, either by entering your own recipes, downloading recipes or entire cookbooks from the Internet, or by swapping cookbooks and recipes with friends. 

Search, Browse and Sort:
The recipes, including those you add yourself, can be searched by key word. For example, you could look for “muffin,” “Asian food, “appetizers” or “artichoke.”  You will get a list of all recipes containing the criteria. Double-click on the recipe name, and the recipe will appear. You can browse the individual cookbooks, listing the recipes by criteria such as alphabetical order, preparation time, category (i.e., soups or entrees) or cuisine (i.e., Mexican.) The search and browse interface is easy and intuitive.

Using an existing recipe: 
The recipe interface is amazing. A tour of the toolbar on the right edge of the screen gives you an idea of some of the program’s capabilities.  From the top, you can :

• enter a totally new recipe; 
• consult a cookery encyclopedia; 
• view the currently open recipe; 
• edit the current recipe; 
• add the recipe to your shopping list, favorite recipe box or to a menu; 
• resize a recipe, to feed one or a crowd; 
• spellcheck; 
• obtain complete nutritional information; 
• e-mail, export or post the recipe to a newsgroup; 
• print a single recipe or a mini cookbook
• and, finally, connect to the MasterCook Web site. 

Add a new recipe: 
The edit screen is also the form you use to enter a new recipe.  As you fill out the form it “auto completes.” I started typing  “cu” and a drop-down menu appeared suggesting that I probably mean “cup.” I did, so I can just tab over to the next field. These drop-down menus are comprehensive, not only for measurements but also for ingredients and preparation methods. If you use some weird ingredient not listed, you can add your own. You can also embed recipes within other recipes. If you have a recipe for Chicken Cesar Salad, for example, you can refer to another recipe for the dressing, without having to retype it.

The recipe directions are at the bottom of the screen. There are tabs you can use to make notes or assign categories to recipes. Some of the pre-loaded recipes come with pictures. If you have a photo of your own recipe, you can add it. You can also include videos.

Importing recipes: 
I experimented with importing recipes that were originally entered using the shareware “MealMaster” program. For the most part, it worked fine. Everything got indexed and inserted into the right slot on the form. However, MealMaster accepts different measurements (c instead of cup, T instead of tablespoon) and the ingredients were nonstandard. When I flipped over to the nutritional information, it was bizarre: a recipe for low-fat bean dip showed up as having 4,127 calories per batch. After I amended the data fields, it was down to a more reasonable 601 calories. The import feature works fine for the basic recipe data but takes some editing to provide accurate nutritional information. Still, it was faster and easier than entering all 305 recipes from the Light Mexican cookbook from scratch!

Nutritional Information: 
This was the main reason I bought the program. To compute my daily diet in Weight Watchers I have to know the calories, fat grams and fiber grams of everything I eat. Not many of my cookbooks contain all of this data, so I can enter the recipe here and get the information I need. Once I’ve calculated the Weight Watchers “points” I can annotate the recipe in the notes section. 

One cool thing about the nutritional information is that you can experiment. What would happen if I cut the amount of oil in half? Took the skin off of the chicken? Used nonfat yogurt instead of sour cream? Eeked five instead of four servings out of this casserole? The results appear instantly. 

Sharing Recipes: 
As mentioned above, I can easily swap entire cookbooks with others using this program. I can e-mail, one or a bunch of recipes to someone else, either in this MasterCook format or in plain text. If I participate in recipe newsgroups, I can post to a newsgroup directly from MasterCook. I can print recipe cards, and even make mini-cookbooks, printed on both sides of the page. The program will prompt me when to flip the paper in my printer.

Menus and shopping lists: 
These features were too obsessive for me. The program contains a “pantry management system,” in which you can log every item in your fridge and cupboard. This interfaces with the shopping list. By clicking on an icon, you can add all of the ingredients from a recipe onto a shopping list. You can build a menu for a day, week or month, add all of the recipes to your shopping list, then combine the ingredients into a master shopping list that has been bounced against your pantry to eliminate duplicates. I’m not that organized! The shopping list can be sorted alphabetically, by supermarket aisle or by recipe. 

Website: 
MasterCook has its own web site, where you can sign up for recipe mailing lists, join discussion groups, download additional free cookbooks and recipes and buy the program.. Well worth a visit!

Availability:
Sierra sells the program on its web site for $19.99, but I got my copy at Amazon.com. It is also available at CompUSA. I’ve been told that recently some breakfast cereals (Cheerios, I’ve been told) have been offering the program for $1.99 shipping cost with three proofs of purchase. MasterCook claims to be the best selling brand of cooking software, so it should be easy to find. If you can’t get it, call Sierra at 800-757-7707 for telephone ordering. There are several other programs in the MasterCook format; the program is the same but the recipes are different.

Requirements: 
MasterCook prefers a Pentium 133, 32 MB RAM and a high color monitor. You will need 60 MB of free hard disk space and a CD ROM drive. You will need your own Internet account if you wish to use their Web site or exchange recipes via e-mail or newgroups. The program comes with a nice 225-page manual.

This is a great program for those who, like me, need precise nutritional information; for those tired of filling out recipe index cards to pass onto friends or thrifty shoppers who bought the jumbo family pack of chicken thighs on sale and need some quick ideas of what to do with 15 pounds of chicken.  Highly recommended!