cookbook

With recipes so freely available online, it's difficult to recommend paying for a cookbook app. There is one such app I plunked down for, and I feel it's worth every penny.

You may know Mark Bittman from his The Minimalist column in The New York Times. He's also the author of a number of cookbooks, including the excellent "How to Cook Everything." The How To Cook Everything app costs $4.99 for the iPhone or $9.99 for the iPad, but each features the entire contents of the How To Cook Everything hardcover, which costs more than twice as much as the iPad app, even at its discounted price on Amazon. And with its timers and shopping list features, the app does things the book can't.… Read more

If you find yourself spending more time in the kitchen and start wondering why some of your dishes work while others fail, pick up a copy of Cook's Illustrated magazine or download the free iPhone app.

The Cook's Illustrated app includes 50 of the magazine's best recipes (subscribers can access more) and makes a great introduction to Cook's Illustrated's scientific approach to cooking. In the magazine, each recipe is prefaced by an article that details the various methods the author tested to prepare a dish, and why the chosen method works best. The app includes a truncated version of the article for each dish along with a video.

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MacGourmet Deluxe can help you collect, edit, use, and share your favorite recipes and recipe-related notes in an easy, intuitive, iTunes-style interface, which is much improved over previous versions. This Deluxe version includes all three optional plug-ins for MacGourmet: the Mealplan (to help schedule meals and sync up with iCal), Cookbook (for creating and sharing PDF cookbooks), and built-in nutritional data from the USDA database (which makes it easy to calculate nutritional info for entire recipes). The main recipe interface is highly customizable and includes a large, easy-to-read "Chef View" for laptop-assisted cooking, which you can control with … Read more

Believe it or not, my stomach is looking forward to the arrival of my iPad (hurry up, UPS!) just as much as my brain. That's because I can envision the tablet on my kitchen counter (sitting upright in a dirt-cheap stand, of course), serving up page after page of delicious recipes, each with tantalizing photos and large, easy-to-read text.

In the meantime, I'm making due with my iPhone (or my wife's iPod Touch--whatever's closer). The print may be a little small, but the cooking/recipe apps are first-rate. Here's a list of my five favorites:… Read more

About a year ago, we shared with you the miBook, an innovative, interactive cookbook. Just in time for the holidays, the miBook has been upgraded, and the price has dropped.

The miBook is like an e-book reader on steroids. Instead of pages of plain text, miBook offers video and audio clips. So when you pull up a recipe, instead of an instruction like "cut up your chicken," you get a video clip with narration: "Slice your chicken tenders into bite-size chunks." You can see the knife being used and the size of the pieces. And the … Read more

I am a sucker for cool kitchen tech. Sleek and shiny gadgets, digital anything--I see them, and I want them, regardless of whether I need them. So what do I want right now? The new Media Chef from Belling.

This sweet-looking 8-inch screen is a digital cookbook--but it's so much more. It comes with 48 built-in cooking lessons and exclusive content featuring British celebrity chef Brian Turner.

The included remote lets you pause, rewind, and play easily, and when you're not using it as a cookbook, the display makes a stunning calendar, MP3 player, or digital photo frame. … Read more

Menu Planner and Cookbook helps plan meals and even prepare them. With simple direction and health-conscious tools, users can get their eating habits quickly in order.

We were initially turned off by the program's unimaginative, black and white layout, but the interface proved to be simple and informative enough that we forgot about it. The program was divided into tools focusing on a cookbook and meal planning. The cookbook was a delight, since it let us choose ingredients to work with and provided recipes that met those criteria. All were simple to follow and sounded tasty. Another aspect we … Read more

Epicurious Recipes and Shopping List is a free app that gives you quick and easy access to more than 25,000 tested recipes from Epicurious.com--originally from sources such as Bon Appetit, Cookie, and Gourmet magazines--along with the ability to save your favorites and create shopping lists for specific recipes.

The app's primary interface divides recipes into broad categories like "Weeknight Dinner" and "Party Snacks," but far more useful and easy to navigate is the app's search function, which lets you search for keywords and select a particular ingredient, course, cuisine, "dietary consideration&… Read more

SousChef is a sleek, easy-to-use cooking tool for collecting, organizing, searching, modifying, and sharing--and even blogging about and cooking from--your recipes. SousChef provides a very straightforward interface for navigating your recipe collection, but its stand-out features are its import tools and full-screen Cook mode. If you paste in recipes as text, SousChef prompts you to drag boxes over the different parts of the recipe, so it can automatically organize ingredients, instructions, notes, and so on. If you want to cook from a recipe, SousChef has an easy-to-read, full-screen "10-foot mode" that lets you keep your computer at a … Read more