Gourmet vs. Every Day Meals

Love my food-apps, ya’all :)

As a member of the Personal Chef Association, Cook Aunty gets occasionally emails from PCA  – The one we got today dealt with ‘There’s an App for that’  @ personal chefs – Carol Borchardt, who was APPCA‘s 2010 Personal Chef of the Year will be conducting a workshop next February on this topic.

And, I am thinking – you are telling me about this fun topic and this fun learning experience, but you are also telling me that I have to wait 4 months for that information? In this remote-control-I-need-this-information-now Age? Cmon!

So, I guess, the next thing for me to do was to just look up some food-related apps – and here are some I found –

1. Fooducate: Go to the grocery store, scan a barcode of a product you want to buy, and see product highlights; even compare products, select better alternatives and dip deeper to learn about nutrition – find out about excessive sugar, tricky transfat, preservatives, high fructose corn syrup, controversial food coloring…

2. Grocery IQ – I have used COZI before for my grocery list, but this one also seems interesting. This is one is powered by Coupons.com and it does the following – creates grocery lists quickly and easily, organizes lists, gets coupons to save money and helps list-sharing to coordinate shopping – seems intuitive!

3. HarvestMark: This one could be a little specific, but its still pretty interesting – So, any produce that has a Harvest Mark logo on it can be scanned and traced to get inside information on that food product.  I am told that Harvest Mark products are sold throughout North America including Driscoll, Fresh Selections, Private Selections (Kroger and Kroger family of stores) etc

4. Recipe Apps: Epicurious (offers recipes from Bon Appetit, Gourmet etc), or Healthy Recipes (allows you to choose reciepes based on calories)

5. Cooking Capsule Taster – actually teaches us to cook!

6. BigOven app has a ‘use-left-overs’ tab which helps users type in ingredients and finds them items to make

7. Omaha Steaks has an app for steaks called ‘Steak Time’ where you can enter the thickness of the steak and preferred done-ness, and it tells us how long it needs to sit on the grill

8.  Of course, there are a lot of paid apps such as Mark Bittman‘s “How to Cook Everything,” and Dorie Greenspan‘s newly released app “Baking with Dorie,” but that would be another blog post!

Happy I-apping, peeps 🙂