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Cooking software comes and goes, and there is a wide variety available. However, most cooking programs are tailored for the average cook. People like me who just want a few interesting new recipes to try, but nothing too complicated, please!
However, despite my aversion to complicated cooking, I do love complications on the other side of the equation: namely, the eating. The more interesting, varied, and tasty the meal, the better. And my husband loves to experiment in the kitchen. So, I get the best of both worlds: He orchestrates the cooking, and I get to eat it. Usually I only get stuck with the buying, the chopping, and, sometimes, the dishes. For people like my husband — born experimenters with a passion for excellence, The Best of Food and Wine is a great find. What sets Food and Wine apart from its cousins in the cookbook industry is the focus. Instead of producing another update-driven, customized recipe collection filled with hordes of slightly different, but common, recipes that anyone can attempt, Food and Wine aims higher. The recipes are not worded for the beginning cook. You need to understand cooking terms and measurements, techniques and processes.
No glossary is included, and no Ten easy steps to gourmet dishes recipes are food. However, Food and Wine is willing to educate and instruct. You just have to be willing to learn. Kitchen Tips offers you everything from the proper way to sharpen your knives, to detailed descriptions of different types of chocolates, to proper methods of cooking different meats, vegetables, and other foods. This is truly the advanced cooking section for gourmet cooks.
The Chefs Demos are instructive, as well. You can learn how to color your pasta for decorative purposes, how to purchase pasta at the store if you cant make your own, and how to best prepare garlic, as just a few examples demonstrate. You can even learn how to chop correctly, how to boil correctly, and how to select wines to go with your new creations. The chefs will also teach you how to prepare the presentations of your meal and how to uses sauces and marinades to their best advantage. Its certainly cheaper than cooking school, and you can learn at your own pace. Best of all, there are no tests except your own taste buds, and nobody will know but you if it takes forty-nine tries to boil water correctly. However, this is not just a cooking school on CD-ROM. It is also a high-tech, easy-interface cookbook with access to some absolutely fabulous recipes. And Ill bet you wont find many of them in your average cookbooks!
The recipe index sorts the tasty treats by alphabetical order, as well as by category, sorted into chapters. You get the standard appetizers, desserts, salads, soups, meats, fish/shellfish, chicken/poultry, and pastas. But, you also get access to the side dishes that can compliment these basic courses, and, best of all, you get the famous Aspen Recipes from the cooking seminars given in Aspen.
Each recipe is, as I mentioned, tailored for the more experienced cooks, but with a little persistence, you can learn to cook these elegant dishes. The Kitchen Tips and Demos will also help you learn what you need to know to really maximize your cooking (and eating) experience. At the very least, youll amaze a few people with your perfect sauces. Maybe even that great-aunt who cant stand your cooking!
If all of this isnt enough to recommend this program, there are two handy utilities that are icing on the cake. The Shopping List will display the things you need for a particular recipe, or group of recipes, that you send to the list. You can scale the recipes for different numbers of guests and it will adjust the list. And the menu-planning Whats for Dinner? tool is a nice find. You can select ingredients, or groups of ingredients, and find recipes by different criteria that fit your search pattern. For example, you can find all the appetizers recipes that include shrimp and bell peppers. Or pasta and garlic. Or …
The program will also allow you to link many of its features like the searches to other Multicom program recipe lists. So, although the program itself is not alterable, you can find ways to expand your horizons. And, if your kitchen is too far from your computer, like mine is, you can print most of the instructions, lists, and information that you find so that you can take it with you to the kitchen. In other words, if you love food, you love to cook, and you want to expand your skills as a culinary expert, The Best of Food and Wine is a much better bargain than the bargain-brand (or even name-brand) standard brand recipe programs. It is Fine Dining compared to fast food.
| Product: | The Best of Food and Wine |
| Company: | Multicom Publishing, Inc. |
| Cost: | $35.95 |
MPC or equivalent, 33 MHz 80486SX or better,
Minimum 8MB RAM, DOS 5.0 or later, Microsoft Windows 3.1 or later
(Windows 95 compatible), MPC-2 Compatible CD-ROM drive (2x or faster),
SVGA monitor/display at 256 colors, MPC compatible audio board, Mouse,
Microsoft CD-ROM Extensions 2.2 or later
No Spam
Adult 
Gambling
Unfinished
Deception
Plagiarism
Not English
