Now now, calm down. This isn’t Cooking Mama. This concerns actual real cooking, with actual real food, and actual real washing up.
Cooking Guide: Can’t Decide What To Eat? is an interactive cooking aid, a tool which is designed to assist new and experienced chefs by taking the traditional weapons of the chef’s arsenal – the cook book, the cookery show, the shopping list and more – and squeezing them into one convenient, portable package. Bear in mind that this comes from Japan, where every guy, girl, grandma and goldfish has a DS and uses it as some sort of mobile dictionary / careers advisor / laptop / personal assistant / pedometer / colouring book. I’m not lucky enough to live in a country where owning a DS is a fact of life, but hopefully this revolutionary Touch! Generations title will put the console into the hands of all of our country’s budding chefs.
Where Cooking Guide succeeds is in its presentation of the entire cooking process – you will literally need nothing else to help you out (except an oven, and some food, and some electricity). The guide takes you through every step of its 250 recipes, from picking up the ingredients in the supermarket (it includes a shopping list feature which automatically updates how much food you need depending on how many you intend to cook for) to running you through the preparation process.
The idea is that you set your DS, volume up, on the side in the kitchen and let it dictate to you the steps of the recipe. It can be voice-controlled, so there’s no need to distract your hands from the necessary tasks, and you can ask for further information at any time. All the steps are narrated, with instructional videos being available for the trickier tasks. The narrator’s voice is calm and clear, although he does have an annoying habit of saying ‘OK!’ whenever he receives an instruction, which can get annoying, which is not good when you have big knives in your kitchen. There is also a timer function, a note pad and quantity calculator to wrap up the package.
The 250 recipes have been compiled from all over the world, so there’s a taste of all continents on the menu, meaning there’s more spice than can be found in the average cookbook. It’s obviously a lot less bulky and cumbersome than your average cookbook, and by buying this, you don’t have to put any money in Jamie Oliver’s pocket.
Oh, a Jamie Oliver reference in a review of a cookery product. How fresh.
It would be easy to criticise this utility, as there are so many options for the wannabe chef nowadays. Cookery programmes are poured out of our TVs like rubbish from skips, and there are more than enough impressive websites out there which collect recipes and cooking advice. But nothing really caters for or appeals to the cooking audience as well as this. It remembers your preferences and favourites, and sorts the recipes by preparation time, difficulty etc. so it's always ready for whatever you want to cook. It’s not just a reference manual, its an advisor. The layout is user-friendly and the process simple to follow, so even this Non-Cook was happy to put together a recipe. And it’s nice to see Japan and American recipes here, rather than recycled stuff that we’re already sick of (I’m looking at you, spaghetti bolognaise).
You could throw some criticism at the RRP (it should be £19.99 rather than £24.99, to be fair), which is the product’s only main weakness, but you have to ask yourself how much you would pay for a DVD that taught you 250 recipes. The scope is great for add-ons and sequels – region-specific titles, for example, or just a copy of this one but with 250 different recipes. And these titles should be encouraged, because the DS could be so useful (and popular) if it was used as a mainstream cooking aid. With Cooking Guide: Can’t Decide What To Eat? hopefully paving the way, it looks like Oliver, Lawson, Smith – heck, even the entire cookbook market in general – need to get out of the kitchen.