Cooking Software

Cooking software? Who needs it? Is it going to cook the food for me or would that require a robot? What a great invention that will be! Until then, we call in personal chefs or other professionals to help us. Ordinary citizens barely have time to cook any more. They certainly don't have time to wait for a computer to boot up or tell them how to boil an egg. It's even faster to type a label for the pickles on the old IBM Selectric than it is to wait for label software to go through its machinations.

Cooking software sounds like one of those things you don't have to use just because somebody invented it, or because "everybody" is doing it. And it isn't something you'd call up just to fix dinner, when you've got all of 20 minutes to put the food on the table. This type of software actually has another purpose in life.

Cooking software can make a personal or private chef's life a lot calmer because of its ability to organize recipes and client records, and to print out nutritional analyses and customized menus. The fact that separate collections of recipes are available on CDs is another tantalizing fact, if the chef has the time to look through them. Some clients will want the same kind of food over and over again, but a good chef will not prepare the exact same thing twice in six months.

Cooking Software Can Be Specialized

If a client wants, say, a Midwestern meal that a chef has never prepared before, he can find it in regional or ethnic recipe collections. Depending on the software, he can also export the recipe to a colleague who needs ideas. Separate diet and nutrition programs are available, if not included in his software of choice. Software can also resize recipes and warn about those that don't survive resizing.