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Cookbook

© Janice Karin

Whether it's the traditional Thanksgiving turkey feast, popcorn balls for Halloween, a romantic Valentine's Day meal for two, or just a random Tuesday night dinner, cooking is a normal part of life. But when your favorite recipes are scattered among four or five cookbooks and a pile of index cards, finding just the recipe you want can be difficult and time consuming. Even if your recipes are nicely organized into one big notebook or card file, holiday meals are often prepared in someone else's kitchen. Rather than lugging bulky cookbooks along for the holiday, use Cookbook by Dovcom to keep your favorite recipes handy.

Cookbook is a recipe database for the Palm. It allows you to create and view recipes in up to 15 user-defined categories. By default it uses the following categories: Appetizers, Beef, Desserts, Poultry, Salads, Seafood, and Soups.

To enter a new recipe tap the New button on the main screen. A blank recipe will popup. It has a standard category drop-down box on the right side of the menu and a name field at the top of the window. Below the name field is the Add Ingredient button followed by a text box for the list of ingredients. Below that is a free form text area for directions.

After choosing a category and naming your recipe, start adding the ingredients. Tapping the Add Ingredient button pops up a small window with fields for quantity, size of unit, and ingredient name. Enter and save information on each ingredient. After all of the ingredients are entered, write preparation and cooking instructions into the Directions area and save the recipe.

The main screen will list the recipes in the database in alphabetical order. By default all recipes are listed, but you can also filter by category. Tapping on any item in the list brings up the specified recipe.

Unfortunately, Cookbook does not sync with MasterCook or other desktop cookbook programs, so if you want to have recipes available in your Palm and on your desktop machine you will have to enter them twice. It would also be nice to maintain a database of available ingredients so common ingredients do not have to be entered for every recipe. Still, the interface is clean and works well for recipe display.

Cookbook is also well suited for storing directions for any projects, not just recipes. Just change the default categories and store various craft projects. Science teachers can use it to categorize and store a list of science fair projects. Any type of project that involves a set of required materials and a set of instructions on how to use the materials will work.