Menu Planner and Cookbook 2.0

• Quick specs
• Price: Purchase
• Operating system: Windows 2000/XP/Vista
• Date added: January 28, 2009
• Total Downloads: 1,321
• Downloads last week: 27
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CNET editors' review

Reviewed by: CNET staff on October 06, 2009

Menu Planner and Cookbook helps plan meals and even prepare them. With simple direction and health-conscious tools, users can get their eating habits quickly in order.

We were initially turned off by the program's unimaginative, black and white layout, but the interface proved to be simple and informative enough that we forgot about it. The program was divided into tools focusing on a cookbook and meal planning. The cookbook was a delight, since it let us choose ingredients to work with and provided recipes that met those criteria. All were simple to follow and sounded tasty. Another aspect we loved was the capability to add our own recipe using a simple wizard. The meal planning utility took those cookbook dishes, and let us choose a meal and see its health aspects, like calories, fat, vitamins, and other important information. The only tricky part was coming up with a dish's health information when we entered our own, but we just took an educated guess. The program also impressed us with its healthy features: a target heart rate finder and a weight loss planner. Both were simple to operate and provided reasonable results that tied into our meal planning. While unpleasing to the eye, this program quickly proved it was a benefit to our stomachs.

The Database tools were disabled during this trial, but didn't affect its usability. The program comes as a compressed file. While it looks boring, Menu Planner and Cookbook provides some exciting results and we highly recommend it.

Publisher's description

I enjoy studying nutrition and healthy eating and I have been studying it for 10 years. Although I understood it, I still had a weight problem because eating healthy and losing weight do not go hand-in-hand. Eating healthy means putting the right foods into your body. Controlling weight has to do with how MUCH you put into your body.

I had 3 problems in controlling weight. First, counting calories is nearly an impossible task. I did not want to calculate the calories in a dish that I made (adding up how much of each ingredient I used while keeping a running total), write it down, file it, and re-calculate it every time I wanted to eat it, based on the portion size that I ate. Even if I did do all of this, what would happen if, for example, my favorite brand of whole wheat pasta was no longer available, and I had to switch brands? I would have to go back and re-calculate every dish that uses it! It was too much!

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