As the end of the year draws near so does my own personal deadline. On January 8th 2009 I vowed I would cook all of the recipes that Personal Trainer Cooking could offer within one year. There are a total of 245 recipes and I have prepared 190 of them so far. With only 20 days and 55 recipes left I honestly don't know if I will be able to make it. Personal Trainer Cooking seemed like such a novel idea. Think about it, PTC turns your friendly hand held gaming device into your own personal kitchen slave. But novel can shortly turn into novelty. I didn't want that to happen I really wanted to use this as if it were one of my kitchen tools so I took the vow. To be sure I have had my ups and downs with PTC but overall it has become not only a part of my kitchen but one of the most valued items in it.

I'm not an idiot I know how to boil water and then some. I love food of such chefs as Tom Douglas and Ina Garten. I take food and cooking very seriously in the terms of taste, quality and health. So why PTC? When I lived in Japan I would drool over what seemed to be hundreds of various cooking programs available for the DS. In case you live in a cave or something the Japanese have this incredible ability to make just about anything look either delicious or insanely cute but often both at the same time. I am all for anything that can teach me how to make food look and taste as good as the Japanese can. Alas being in Japan all of the cooking programs where in Japanese. If I bought one of the programs I was not confident I would be able to use it confidently. So I was so excited last year to see Personal Trainer Cooking enter the US market. I thought by familiarizing myself with one of the cooking programs in English first then I would be more confident to use one of the better looking programs only available in Japanese. Also there was the hope that if PTC caught on other programs would fallow. Sadly that doesn't seem to be the case. To date there are only two other programs that have been made for the US market. One featuring Jamie Oliver and another focusing on healthy cooking. Neither one of these is at all interesting to me. In fact I was never even really interested in PTC for the recipes either. But over this past year I have fallen in love with Personal Trainer Cooking.

I fell in love for many reasons. The layout of the program is well through out. I love being able to choose what I want to cook on a whim. Out with traditional cookbooks and their table of contents and indexes. Instead pick a country or maybe and individual ingredient. Don't want to bother with that? Just use the stylus and write down what you want! You never see someone carrying around a cookbook in a grocery store or at a market, checking off each item that they need for a dish. If you were like me you had to use that silly table of context and the index to first find the recipe and write it down and try not to forget something and then go to the store. But my DS fits write in my purse! It also has a shopping list feature so no flipping through recipes to make sure nothing is missing. There are so many other features to go on about but I won't.

Let's talk about the recipes. For the most part the recipes are at least decent. Tonight my boyfriend and I dined on Veal Saltimbocca. It was just lovely. Clearly though this was written from a Japanese point of view. For example the lasagna recipe calls for bachamel sauce and not the typical ricotta mixture often used in American versions of lasagna. This brings back a bit of nostalgia for me because personal experience tells that ricotta is insanely hard to find in Japan. I never found any and I am sure if I did I wouldn't have been able to afford it. But the lasagna kit I use to buy always had bachamel sauce. Making lasagna the DS way brought back nice memories of Japan and it tasted good too. The DS interruptation of American Chili Con Carne seemed to have gotten lost in translation somehow. The recipe calls for hot dogs to be added to the traditional bowl of meat and beans. But it just seems like they got a chili dog confused with a bowl of chili. Or the fine staff at Tsuji Cooking Academy looked at how messy it would be to eat a chili dog and they cleaned it up a bit. I don't know. In fact the vast majority of the recipes have been really tasty and easy to prepare. Except for the Vietnamese Stuffed Pancake. That was horrible mess. I don't know what I kept doing wrong but it just didn't work out. I was very disappointed too because I really was excited to try it. Also I was not very fond of the Broccoli and Tuna Sushi. Somehow the pickled ginger, broccoli, mayo and tuna, all things I love, sadly did not taste very nice together. Overall many of the recipes have been amazing and verified hits among family and friends who became my unknown guinea pigs on countless occasions. Among top crowd pleasers have been the Tartiflette, Chocolate Mousse, Egg Tarts and Crab Cakes to name a few.

Personal Trainer Cooking isn't a toy or a novelty for that matter. It is a real kitchen instrument. If we can check our email from our phones, watch movies from our laptops why can't we seriously cook with our gaming devices? A DS is far more versatile then a cookbook or a cuisine art. You can play games and feed a family all with the same device. Plus it is small and portable leaving a lot more space in your kitchen for fun kitchen gadgets! As technology continues to march on all around us this is some serious food for thought.