AROUND HOME : Cookbook on a Computer

FOR MOST PEOPLE the idea of putting a cookbook on a computer disc probably doesn’t sound like an improvement. After all, cookbooks work fine just as they are. You don’t need to plug in a cookbook or read an operating manual before you can use one, either. Still, Micro Cookbook is surprisingly useful.

Micro Cookbook, a computer program manufactured by Pinpoint, offers 150 recipes including steak Diane, pan-fried scallops, sole en Gougons and warm beer soup. As usual, most recipes are for four people. But (and this is one of the virtues of having recipes on a computer) the program will print out a recipe for any number of diners. If, for instance, you tell the computer you’d like to have an intimate dish of scalloped potatoes for two, it tells you to start with 1 1/2 peeled potatoes and half a quart of milk. On the other hand, if it’s dinner for 10, it recommends that you start with 12 peeled potatoes and two quarts of milk.

It’s more fun if you start from the other direction--you have no idea what you want to serve but you’ve looked in the refrigerator and you have plenty of fresh sweet basil, garlic and butter. When you enter those ingredients into the program, it tells you that basil is used in nine recipes, garlic in 46 and butter in 59. Furthermore, there are two recipes that use all three: pesto spaghetti, and chicken and mushrooms.

Another feature. Now you don’t have to read from your old cookbook on the counter, with its broken spine and spattered pages. You just order the program to print out the recipe. Then once you’re finished making the dish, you can throw out the hard copy--grease spots, smears and all.

Most useful perhaps is the shopping-list feature. You enter all the dishes you plan to serve at your next dinner party (beef stew, paella, spicy shrimp, risotto and lime pie) and it prints out ingredient totals so, when you go to the supermarket, you know how much of each item to buy (one chopped onion for the stew, one sliced onion for the shrimp and half a cup of diced onion each for the risotto and paella).

Micro Cookbook won’t compel people to throw away their cookbooks and go out and buy computers instead. But it’s a lot more useful than one might think at first.

Micro Cookbook is available at Egghead Software stores throughout Southern California for $39.99.