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Five essential cookery apps to tantalize those tastebuds

Posted by Jennifer Allen on October 25th, 2015

We all need to cook at some point, right? I mean you can live off takeaway and microwave meals for a while, but it’s really not as satisfying as home cooked food.

It gets expensive fast, too, so how about you use that money to download some great cookery apps instead? Seriously, it’s fun to cook. We’ve rounded up five apps that will make it all the sweeter.

Favorite 4: Cookery Apps

Posted by Jennifer Allen on February 22nd, 2011

One exceptionally handy thing about iOS devices is that they're so very portable. Even more so than a laptop or netbook. Sure I can take my laptop into the kitchen and place it on the side while I consult it for recipe ideas but my kitchen isn't big enough to sacrifice a potential preparation area in favour of the laptop. In the case of my iPhone though, I can hold it in one hand while I stir with the other. Ideal! There's a huge multitude of cookery apps that aim to help or inspire you in the kitchen, but here are my picks of the bunch.

Around the World in 80 Recipes: This app is gorgeous. It's the equivalent of that recipe book that might not provide the cheapest or most convenient of recipes, but you'll love to just virtually flick through it and take in the delights. Offering an old fashioned looking map interface where you choose what country you want to look at according to its stamp, it's more than just a list of recipes. When you get to the actual recipe, you're given a gorgeous photo of the food making it look even more appetising and the ingredients and instructions are detailed but not intimidating. An ideal app for the connoisseur who fancies arranging a dinner party.

Easy Cooking: Of course you don't always want complicated, glamorous meals. Sometimes you just want good, simple food. Easy Cooking offers a whole array of different recipe ideas from the leftover type meals such as Breakfast Casserole to how to cook a good roast chicken. All the steps are easy to understand the addition of a description that suggests what accompaniments would go well with each meal is a great touch. Its New York Cheesecake recipe is particularly delicious!

AllRecipes: Dinner Spinner: Trying to decide what to eat each day can be tough, even if you love cooking. Inspiration isn't always easy to come by. AllRecipes: Dinner Spinner aims to add some randomness to the equation by coming up with a recipe for you. You can be entirely random or you can focus on certain food types. If for example, you know you fancy having a pasta main dish, select that and the app will come up with loads of suggestions of what you can do. You can even adjust it according to how long you want to spend cooking, making finding quick recipes a much easier task than in other recipe apps. Each recipe is submitted by a regular person rather than a chef so they're typically very easy to prepare. A load of nutritional information is great too for the health conscious. The only real downside is that recipes aren't available offline but this isn't too big a deal if you're in the house anyway. There's a Pro version available too which offers a few extra bits and pieces but the Free version will serve you well for a while to come.

Cookery School Multi-Timer: Timing is everything with cooking. Being able to cook one thing isn't that hard, being able to cook a whole meal ensuring that everything's ready at the same time is the hard part. Multi-Timer goes some way to solving this problem by allowing you to set up numerous timers correlating to the various items that need to go in the oven/on the hob at differing times. You can set it up meal by meal meaning you don't have to keep re-inputting new information every time. You can simple tap Roast Dinner for instance and it'll have all your timings there from last time. It's a huge help made even better by the fact that it's free.