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Demy Kitchen Safe Recipe Reader

12 April 2009 2 Comments

Where has this thing been all my life? I just saw this on Tastespotting.com today and it immediately caught my attention – I had to go do a little research.

This seems to be the answer to all my dreams! I’ve been wanting a laptop or netbook I could take into the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to keep printing out my recipes over and over. And I don’t really like using paper anyway – it just gets all trashed in the kitchen and I end up throwing it away. But I was wondering how I would keep a laptop or netbook clean.

Voila! Enter the Demy Kitchen Safe Touchscreen Recipe Reader. This looks perfect! Splash resistant; you can wipe it clean. Touch screen so you don’t have to worry about gunking up a keyboard.

You can stand it up…

or angle it back, whichever works better for you.

It even includes some timers…

and a unit converter!

This really appeals to my very present geeky side – I love gadgets. Of course, just like the netbooks, it’s almost $300. Sigh. Why do I have to be so expensive?

I want one.

What about you all? Does this intrigue you as much as it does me? Would you like one of these, or do you prefer a traditional book, paper print out or a laptop?

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2 Comments »

Robert said:

There are some good things about this Demy but, more wrong then what I care to deal with. Will look at it later to see if they have fixed it.

1. The cookbooks that the Demy came pre-loaded (as well as the individual recipes) cannot be deleted *at this time*. I just spoke to someone in Customer Service, and apparently this option will not be available until mid-August at the earliest.

2. The cookbooks/recipes that are already on the Demy DO NOT show up on the recipe website. So for example, one of the pre-loaded cookbooks is “Beef and Pork”. If you decide you like that cookbook and want to load a favorite beef recipe into that cookbook – it doesn’t work because since they don’t register on the website, there is no way to add them.

3. There is no way to add/delete recipes or cookbooks right on the Demy. A small issue, but one that would be tremendously nice to have. There is also no way to search by keywords, so if you’re looking for a specific recipe that doesn’t have one of the ingredients in the title, you’re out of luck. The index only lists recipes alphabetically.

4. There is no way to delete cookbooks you add personally. That’s right – if you add a cookbook and decide you want to delete it in favor of something else, it will delete on the website but NOT on the Demy. For example, when I realized that I couldn’t access the Beef and Pork cookbook, I wondered if adding an identically titled cookbook would help by taking the place of the first one, allowing me to access it. Nope. I got two identically titled cookbooks – no big deal, until I realized after deleting it on the website that it will not come off the Demy.

5. While the Demy will “sleep” after whatever preset time you program, it will not turn off, so it still sucks battery power. To actually turn the machine off, you have to hold the power button in the back until it beeps. Of course, if your machine does turn off (battery dies, etc.), then when you power it back on, rather than going back to the recipe you were using, it takes you back to the home screen, leaving you to find your place again. Small issues, but ones that would be nice if they were fixed. It would be nice to have my original place come back first, particularly if I’m in the middle of a dish.

6. Another small complaint is the process for adding recipes to the website. I either have to type them all in myself, or pay something like 50 cents per recipe to the companion site to have them loaded to the website for me. So, if like many, I get this machine to store a lot of loose recipes, that’s either a bunch of typing over a long period of time, or a fair amount of money. While I’m no software guru, I would think it would be possible to scan my own recipes in, rather than typing them all by hand. And for any recipes stored on my computer, like a photo program, the software could scan my computer and create a file to load.

Quite honestly, for the price of this item, most of these things should have been taken care of before it was released. I love the idea of the Demy, and would love to keep it, but the execution of the software leaves a lot to be desired and makes it much more clunky than helpful. I am honestly thinking hard about returning it until a later date when I know that these issues (or at least the big ones) will have been fixed.

# 13 January 2010 at 5:12 pm

Digigirl (author) said:

Thanks for the review, Robert. Sounds like the Demy definitely has a ways to go before it’s the kitchen assistant of our dreams, huh? Now I know to wait for Demy to improve before I waste my money. Thanks!

# 17 January 2010 at 3:03 pm