I love to cook! Some of my favorite activities are finding new and interesting recipes, shopping for ingredients, and trying to put it all together into a delicious meal.
I’ve put together a list of apps I use frequently that ensure there will be some great food (and drinks!) on the table. For those of you who share my love of food and wine, you can’t go wrong with these apps. Bon appetit!
Along with a number of other reasons to use Evernote, I keep all of my recipes on this app. The recipes are automatically synced to all of my devices, so I can set up my laptop or iPad in the kitchen for easy reference while I’m cooking.
This is the best to-do list app I have ever used. I mostly use Wunderlist for my shopping lists. What I really love is that the app lets you share lists with other people, so if my wife wants me to pick something up from the store, I just say, “throw it on the Wunderlist” and it shows right up on my phone!
In our household, I am responsible for planning the meals for the week. When I’m looking for inspiration for a new meal, I fire up Allrecipes. I can browse through their recipe library to find highly rated meals, or I can search by ingredient – “I have chicken breasts in my freezer. What should I do with them?” Very useful to find new recipes!
My wife and I love to have a nice bottle of wine with dinner. And we love to pick out new bottles at the store to give them a try. But after a while, it’s nearly impossible to remember which bottles we’ve tried, what we liked, and what we hated.
I have tried to keep track in text documents, spreadsheets, and other apps, but it’s always so cumbersome typing in all the information from the bottle: the vineyard, the varietal of grape, the year, etc. It’s especially difficult to figure all that out when the label is in a foreign language!
Drync is a remarkable technology. You simply launch the app and take a photo of the label; it then automatically enters all the information about the wine for you. You can save your personal rating on the wine, and Drync keeps the whole list – it’s fantastic!
Look, after a long workweek, sometimes I just want to put on sweat pants and sit on the couch. On a night like that, Seamless is my best friend. Local Thai food delivered to my door in under an hour, and I don’t even have to get on the phone to order it? Yes please!
I’ll admit it – I’m not above taking a picture of an awesome meal I just made and posting it to my Instagram page. (Don’t judge me! At least I don’t put filters on them!)
- Safeway (or whatever your local grocery store is)
When I’m on my weekly shopping trip, I like to check this app to see what discounts and coupons are available to me. The app is synced to my Safeway discount card, and the app will give me customized coupons for items I buy regularly. A great app for the thrifty among us!
When it’s time to leave the kitchen and go try somebody else’s food, I like to use OpenTable to figure out what’s new, what’s good, and what’s available for a reservation in my area.