• Mood: pleased

[Cooking] Handy Cookbook--aptly named!

Some people asked for feedback if I found my dream cooking app, and I have. Handy Cookbook (don't let the Italian put you off--the app itself is in English) met all the requirements I listed in my earlier post and exceeded them. It lets me upload recipes to it through a handy web interface and even parses the text, trying to break the ingredients down into quantities, units and ingredients. It will then create a combined shopping list for me, though I note I need to standardise how I describe ingredients to get the most out of it. It has rightly garnered fulsome praise and is only A$2.49 from the iTunes Store.

If I can suggest improvements for a future version, it would be to let you double a recipe on the fly, and the ingredient parsing still needs some tweaking. Also, we've gotten heavily into slow cooker recipes, and it's kind of amusing to be listing the cooking time as being 480 minutes.

rosequoll has also been checking out cooking apps and she recommended All My Recipes but I didn't pick that one because I couldn't tell if it would let me upload recipes from my desktop, but it looks like another very capable cooking app.

DISCLAIMER: The iTunes Store links I provided are to the Australian iTunes Store--I'm not sure how well they will work for US readers.