Simplify cooking and grocery shopping

By Katie Ritchie

Have you planned your Thanksgiving menu? How about your holiday meal grocery shopping list? If you still need to work on it, there are free apps that can help! The best news? You don’t need to wait until the next big holiday to start using them.

My favorite option is the Paprika Recipe Manager. The free version won’t allow you to save more than 50 recipes at a time. The free version also doesn’t have cloud sync. The app works by letting you search for recipes from your favorite websites, or by inputting your own. You can customize any recipes you save using the app, so feel free to substitute ingredients or add notes as you go. Once you’ve sampled the recipe, you can even rate it for future reference.

There are some great features that can help you out in the kitchen. The first of which is a scaling function. It will let you easily double, quadruple, or more a recipe to feed your next big gathering. The second is the timer function. You can have multiple timers running concurrently. Need to keep track of how long it has been since you basted the turkey and how long the potatoes have been on the stove? You can!

The other thing I like is how easy it is to migrate ingredients from the recipes to the in-app grocery list. Just uncheck the things you already have in the fridge or pantry and add the rest to your cart.
Another app is BigOven. The BigOven’s interface is a little less intuitive than Paprika. It allows you to select the number of servings you’d like. It then scales your measurements accordingly.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the handy timer function of Paprika. BigOven will also let you add ingredients to your grocery list without saving the recipe.