I recently did a presentation in which the scenario was cooking down a data source.  I ended up created these visual aids in Visio on the plane.  I hope they might help others out there understand cookdown.

Other resources

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381335.aspx

http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/vdipippo/pages/workflow-cook-down-in-operations-manager-2007.aspx

http://nocentdocent.wordpress.com/category/scom/cookdown/

 

 

 

Cooldown between two or more workflows

 

 

Multi-Instance Cookdown

 

 

 

 

 

 

#cookdown in system center operations manager