Stirring the Virtual Pot

Compton's Complete Interactive Cookbook

by Marianne Bray

Compton s Home Library has all the ingredients of a winner with its Complete Interactive Cookbook.

This marvelous multimedia meander through the kitchen is aimed at everyone from food fraidies to gastronomic gurus and is chock full of meat  and just about every other food. It includes some 2500 recipes, 8000 colour pictures, 2000 "chef s tips" that give you insight into terminology, techniques, ingredients and substitutions, and even 50 video clips that show you various cooking techniques.

"Complete Interactive Cookbook" also gives you a powerful, searchable database with which you can find recipes by name, category, ingredient, nutritional value, or all of the above.

You can also plan menus with the disc, as well as creating and saving your own favourite culinary creations.

One feature I really liked, since we have two kids who may or may not be home for any particular meal, is the scalability of the recipes. By typing in the number of servings you want, the recipe automatically updates its ingredients to the amount required to feed whatever number of hungry people you require. Of course, you can accomplish the same thing with a calculator, but with this disk you don t have to.

I m a pretty good cook, but I turn into a real shopping basket case once I set foot into supermarket. Fortunately, this Compton s disk spins to the rescue with its printed shopping lists  though I don t know any food stores that ll sell one egg or one tablespoon of tomato paste (as the list I printed for the Microwave Meatloaf recipe recommended).

Meatloaf may be a pretty mundane menu item, but you can also get a lot more esoteric with this CD s generous selection of virtual cookbooks, which includes everything from "the Book of Afternoon Tea" to "a Gourmet s Guide to Vegetables" or  more to my liking  "the Book of Desserts."

Each of these books includes a short introduction to set the stage, and a selection of related recipes (the Ice Cream book s recipes range from Apricot Ice Cream to Watermelon Sorbet) from which to choose.

The Chef s Tips are pretty nifty, too. One tips menu, mounted atop the screen, brings up topics like beverages, ethnic cooking, or videos, while the other "Chef s Tips" menu pops up with individual recipes and offers hints about the particular ingredients or techniques involved in that particular mealtime masterpiece.

The "Menu Planner" feature lets you create a whole meal based on a particular theme or ingredient; I planned a Christmas dinner and printed out a shopping list without even expending any conscious thought  all while customizing the prepackaged menu to suit my own tastes (hold the healthy stuff and maximize the cardiac quotient!)

The only problem with this disk is that it needs to be installed on a computer in the kitchen  and I don t have one. Still, it s quite complete, easy to navigate and use, and very customizable: you can even get it to display in Imperial or metric measurements.

The videos are also a nice touch, and can come in handy if you think steaming vegetables means making them mad at you.

Now, if only Jenny Craig had a CD-ROM &

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