CNET Editors' review
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
From Air Judden Enterprises:
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!
More Popular Recipe Software downloads
- WW Points Calc
231 downloads
- Recipe Card O-Matic
180 downloads
- Recipe Cards for Word
93 downloads
- Living Cookbook 2011
75 downloads
- Cook'n Recipe Organizer
68 downloads
-
All versions:
2.7 starsout of 3 votes
-
Current version:
3.5 starsout of 2 votes
-
My rating:
Write review
Results 1-2 of 2
-
"Didn't have features I wanted"
Version: Menu Planner and Cookbook 2.0
Pros
It's easy to use
Cons
Doesn't have flexability
Summary
I can't use it
-
"Make Eating Well and Weight Loss Much Easier!"
Version: Menu Planner and Cookbook 2.0
Pros
This program helped me lose 90 pounds in 5 months. I cannot say enough about how great it is. Very user friendly!
Cons
It is boring to look at, but I don't care. It isn't a video game. It works!
Summary
I love the yummy recipes, the option of searching by ingredients I have on hand, the printable grocery list I can generate, the way it predicted the date I would lose weight by based on my calorie and exercise input. This program does so many things!
Add Your Review
Submit your reply
E-mail this review
Report offensive content
See more CNET content tagged:
Previous Versions:
