The recipes here are all family fare and comfort food; pot roast, Instant Party Potatoes, and a cake that actually has Coca-Cola among the ingredients were a few that caused flashbacks. Interestingly, we also found recipes for venison and pheasant--ingredients we don't usually "have right on hand."

This CD-ROM is easier to navigate than some of the other Cook'n titles, and the production quality of the tutorial videos sprinkled throughout the program is also improved. Cooks can adjust the main page to browse by category, ingredient, or photograph (500 out of 600 recipes have pictures). There are 10 chapters of recipes, which range from main dishes to soups to salads to desserts.

This program quickly jumps through all of the hoops we expect cooking CD-ROMs to manage: it adjusts serving sizes, compiles shopping lists and nutritional analysis charts from recipes, helps cooks find recipes based on what they have in the cupboard, and creates weekly, even yearly, menus for the ultra-organized. Recipes and shopping lists can be downloaded onto Palm Pilots, and old-fashioned folks can print these recipes on three-by-five cards (not provided with the program).

For truly nonintuitive cooks, this program will translate the recipe's required 2 cups of tomato sauce into the required number of cans you must buy, then give you a choice of whether you want to put Hunts, Progresso, or Classico on the list for when you swing by the store. We think this is a bit much: at some point, the anal-retentive capabilities of these cooking programs will bog cooks down just as much as sloppily filed index cards from Granny. We'd rather see more recipes and fewer brand names. --Anne Erickson

Cook'n with Taste of Home adds a menu planner, grocery-shopping assistant, and home nutritionist. Build your own weekly and monthly menus. Learn techniques that save time. Compile your grocery list automatically with the handy shopping assistant; it organizes your list by aisle and estimates the cost, saving you time as well as watching out for your money. It even converts measures used in recipes to those used in the store, so you buy just the right sized can! Download your shopping list from Cook'n to your PalmPilot handheld for complete organization. A built-in database holds nutrition facts from the labels of 10,000 food products, so you can determine which products best meet your dietary needs. The home nutritionist also analyzes recipes and menus, including the ones you add!