I received an email from Carol Rohde recently about one of Cook'n's newer features:

Carol gave me a great example.

Suppose a recipe uses 1 cup of flour in the crust, but then uses another 1/4 cup of flour later in the filling. Cook'n might see "flour" in the filling directions and mistakenly insert 1 cup instead of 1/4 cup.

That's obviously not very helpful!

The feature doing this is called Smart Directions.

Smart Directions looks at the ingredients in your recipe and automatically adds ingredient amounts to the directions. So instead of a direction that says:

Cook'n might display:

Most of the time, that's really handy. You don't have to keep scrolling back up to the ingredient list to remember how much flour, sugar, butter, or milk you're supposed to add.

But Carol discovered an important exception.

If the same ingredient appears more than once in a recipe with different amounts, Smart Directions can occasionally get confused about which amount belongs in which step.

As I explained to Carol:

That's it!

Once Smart Directions is turned off, Cook'n will stop automatically inserting ingredient amounts into your directions, and you'll see the directions as they were originally written.

Carol wrote back:

You're very welcome, Carol! And thank you for bringing this to my attention.

Feedback like this is particularly valuable to us because Smart Directions really is intended to make cooking easier, not more confusing! 😊

And examples like Carol's help the Cook'n Elves understand where these smart features still need to get a little...smarter!