Julie Gumm - Author

Ditching the recipe books – Paprika App Review

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Now that I’m not working full-time I’m making progress on a project that started several months ago – ditching the recipe books.

Thankfully I’m not an avid collector like my sister-in-law, but I have a half dozen recipe books plus a card box of family recipes and stuff I’ve collected over the years.

The truth, of course, is that I use no more than 6-8 recipes out of any single book and yet they’re taking up all this space in my cabinet.

(There is ONE exception and that is Mary Ostyn’s “Family Feasts for $75“. That book will remain because I use a TON of recipes from it and there are still more I want to try.)

Last year I discovered an awesome iPad app called “Paprika”. There’s a great review here and the app site is here.

In a nutshell these are my favorite features:

  • Open it’s browser and go to your favorite recipe site, find the recipe you want and click one button and it downloads the entire recipe into the app.
  • For blogs or other non-foody sites with a few extra clicks you can save a recipe.
  • Make a weekly meal plan using your recipe collection and it automatically creates a grocery list that you can then edit to leave off items you already have.
  • Email a recipe with one click.
The one draw back has been getting my written recipes in. I was paying the kids $.25 a recipe to type them into Word. Then I’d copy it into an email I sent myself. Open the email on the iPad and go back and forth with copy/paste. Not great.
But a month ago or so they came out with Paprika for the Mac that uses iCloud to sync with the iPad. Yippee!! I quickly shelled out the $20.
Yesterday I quickly went through my cookbooks and marked the recipes I needed to enter. Then this morning I had a brain flash and instead of typing it I just opened Paprika on my Mac, googled “Betty Crocker Best Chocolate Cake Recipe”. Sure enough found it, clicked the “Save Recipe” button and “wah-lah”. DONE.

  

    

Billion dollar question

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I’m not sure how it came up, but at the dinner table we ended up talking about what we’d do if we had a billion dollars.

Noah said he’d buy every LEGO set in existence.

“And?” I asked.

He stared at me like I was crazy. I explained that he would still have LOTS of money left over. He wasn’t convinced.

They really have NOOO concept of a billion dollars 🙂

So then I asked all of them “What are 3 things you would do if you had a billion dollars?”

I purposely said “do” vs. “buy” because I was hoping that someone would say something like “feed all the hungry kids”. Yeah, not so much.

NOAH

  • Buy every LEGO set in existence.
  • Buy a huge house so he had room for all his LEGOS.
  • Buy every video game system and game.

LUKE

  • Buy a football field (I said maybe he should have a house on the land too.)
  • Build a school (location unspecified)
  • He’s undecided on his third choice

NATALIE

  • Buy a ranch with horses
  • Buy a seafood restaurant so she could eat all the shrimp she wanted
  • Buy a zoo

BEZA

  • Buy all the kids at school an iPad to use instead of textbooks
  • Buy a restaurant
  • Buy a big house with maids

Notice that no where in there is “buy mom a convertible”. Or buy mom anything for that matter. Guess I know how I rank 🙂

We ran out of time before we got to Mark and I, so we promised we’d answer tomorrow.

What would you do with a billion dollars?

What I’m really thinking about parenting…

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The other day a friend on Facebook posted a link to this amazing article “Don’t Carpe Diem”.

I swear it’s like the writer is inside my head.

Every time someone looks at my children and says “It goes by so fast. Make every moment count,” I say “I know” and nod my head sweetly.

What I really want to say is “Promise? Because this is HARD! And sometimes it feels like there’s no end in site.”

But, of course, I don’t. And then I feel guilty for thinking that.

Loved this part of the article…

“My point is this. I used to worry that not only was I failing to do a good enough job at parenting, but that I wasn’t enjoying it enough. Double failure. I felt guilty because I wasn’t in parental ecstasy every hour of every day and I wasn’t MAKING THE MOST OF EVERY MOMENT like the mamas in the parenting magazines seemed to be doing. I felt guilty because honestly, I was tired and cranky and ready for the day to be over quite often. And because I knew that one day, I’d wake up and the kids would be gone, and I’d be the old lady in the grocery store with my hand over my heart. Would I be able to say I enjoyed every moment? No.”

Go read the whole thing. Glennon Melton’s article hits the nail on the head.

At least for this mama.