You Are Your Own Chef

I was going to go and finally make a full review of D2, Kenji Eno's Magnum Opus, but then I got my paws on something newer and more interesting. It's called Cooking Guide, a Nintendo-created (with assistance from the Tsuji Cooking Academy, which I assume is 'huge in Japan'.) cookbook with features crammed in every single bit of it's unnaturally large ROM.

For some reason or another, I got the UK version of the game. Er, DS Application.
It shouldn't make too much of a difference, but it uses all these strange English terms like 'hob' and the equally weird English spellings for words like 'fibres'. It's to my preference anyway, as I tend to use English-styled grammar myself.

When you first turn on your DS, you will be amazed at what you're hearing. Well, maybe not, but I was pretty impressed. Cooking Guide offers a little animated chef figure who actually talks to you. This is the first game on the DS to have feature a TTS (text to speach) engine (either that, or this dude just sounds really artificial). The next time you run Cooking Guide, the chef will greet you with the unusually appetizing phrase, "Can't decide what to eat? Let's make something tastey." The voice is as one of those steriotypical congested gourmet chef types, but it sounds very good. It is a bit quiet, though, so you'd might not want to run this on a DS Lite, because they tend to have quieter sound.

Before we explore the titular 'Cooking Guide' section, let's explore the lesser features of the software. The settings screen contains the expected things, like sound controll, mic tests, and voice options (for both you and the chef). However, it also contains one unexpected feature. It's 'Excluded Ingrediants', which will warn you with a red box with an 'x' over the pictures of foods which contain those ingrediants. Excelent for crossing out allergies. I used it to warn me of recipeis which contain fish, simply because I can't stand any of it. Also included in this section, although I don't think it really belongs there, is a kitchen timer, for obvious purposes.

Also on the main menu is 'Cooking A-Z'. If you're a terrible cook, you should go about reading all of it. If you're experianced, like myself, just read 'Important points', which contains various information that you must keep in mind as you read and cook the recipes, such as to use 'dark' soy sauce, and all recipies with sugar use somewhat obscure johakuto sugar, and you can substatute dark sugar. As some of the recipies available on Cooking guide are fairly obscure, you may want to skim through 'Substitute Ingrediants'. Some things need bases which you may not be able to find pre-made, so there's a selection of simple base recipies available through 'homemade ingrediants', but those are also linked to the recipies that use them, so you'll be able to make it as you're preparing to make the dish that needs to use it. And on the bottom of the cooking A-Z page is a list of movies which show some basic techniques. Do not look at how to prepair squid. You will vomit.


The final feature, the one that's perhaps most useful to the end-user, is the Shopping list. It's somewhat automatically populated; when you look through the ingrediant lists of recipies, you can put a check next to what you need to buy, and it'll appear on the shopping list. Each ingrediant is listed alphebetically, with checkboxes so you can keep track of what you have already. A downfall of this list is that if you have multiple ingrediants in different recipies, it won't combine them. Luckally though, there's a handy calculator that you can pull up at any time while viewing the list. A benefit of the uncombined ingredients, however, is that you can see what it is that you need each quantity of it for, and go straight to the recipie from there.

Now, to the bulk of Cooking Guide: the Cooking Guide.

The Cooking Guide contains 214 recipies, which doesn't really seem like much. I still don't know if that's the big complex recipies or all the recipes, including basic ones like Stock. Cooking Guide has a multitude of ways with which you can find them. You can find them by what ingredients they contain, by keywords, by which recipies you have ingrediants selected from, by country, by ones you marked favorates, or by 'requirements', which is a search that returns results based on user set dependencies, such as if you wrote notes on it, if you've cooked it, how easy it is to make, how many calories it contains, or how it's cooked. You'd think it'd be overkill, but it's not; sometimes you want something different, and sometimes you want something you really like. The favorates system can mold from being foods that you want to try to being something you really love to make, and sometimes you do have requirements like a ten-minute cooking time.

My personal favorate is searching by country, which displays a broken-down scrolalble map where you can search by ethnicity (even though all the recipies are technically Japanese). There's a large selection of delicious-looking French food, including crepes and soufles. I'm personally waiting until we go shopping so I can make a good Indian meal of Keema Curry with rice and a side of Lassi.

When you select a recipe, you can add notes through Cooking Guide's interesting charicter recognition technique, where you write letters one at a time in two boxes, which makes writing much easier and faster. I don't think this is new; I think it was used in Level5's Professor Layton. You can also add it to your favorates at a single touch. The button to get into the main feature's cooking mode, 'Start Cooking', is actually three buttons. If this is new to you, tap 'View Ingrediants' to do it's titular tast. Or if you already have the ingrediants layed out, tap 'Cook'. For those of you who just need to reference a recipie, you can touch 'View Steps' and start cooking from a later step.

The ingrediants screen is nice; it shows ingrediants, utensils (which include pans and wraps), and servings (which you can alter to an extent, with all of the ingrediants following suite and changing quantity). The only real problem I have with this is that it's all in metric. Just ask your grocer for 550 grams of lamb mince.

Cooking mode is great, especially because it's so minimalist without actually being so. The speach recognition isn't as great as it could be, especially, as I'd imagine, in a loud noisy kitchen. Particularly, "More Details!" didn't work. Then again, this may just be because I'm not English. The Cooking Guide chef sounds really nice, and he really shouldn't be turned off. He gives extra tips when he talks, and he doesn't just read what's on the screen. And he sounds all nice, like he would be fun to hug. The steps are simple; even an idiot would be able to follow it.

And now, as it's late at at night, I stop before I get to my feelings about the software. I just said that someone would be fun to hug, what do you expect?