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.
