Instant Recipe review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 29 May 2002

Price when reviewed: (£10)

Reviewed By: Miriam Underhill

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

If you've always found the thought of people filing their recipes in alphabetical order worrying, be very afraid.

You'll be amazed how many programs are created to do just that - even cross-referencing recipes according to available ingredients, calorie content and cooking times. So is there any point in a virtual card index that details the contents of your fridge?

Instant Recipes provides a database of 200 recipes, but no celebrity chef to help with sales. It's simple to add your own recipes, and you can even paste in photographs (assuming you're the sort of person who takes pictures of meals after you've cooked them). As well as searching for dishes by ingredient or cooking time, you can hunt for recipes according to cost - though this option rather terrifyingly assumes that you have previously entered up-to-date prices for every type of food on the database.

Instant Recipes is easy to use, but it's packed with pointless Stepford Wife-ish activities that are presented in a manner so bland and hopeless, it's hard to imagine them inspiring you to put anything into a gas oven other than your own head.

It's really not all that hard to use the index of a cookery book to search for recipes, or to copy out a shopping list using a pen. If you're desperate to catalogue your recipe collection, Instant Recipes lets you do it with ease. More balanced folk should go for MasterCook: Two Fat Ladies to aide their computer-culinary capers.

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