Thursday, April 28, 2011

Appy to See You

"What do you want for dinner?" I don't know how it was at your house growing up but in mine, this was a question I heard a lot. Finding meals that children and spouses will eat. Usually I hoped it wasn't something that involved plumbing the depths of our chest freezer to find just the right package of meat. Cold hardy my fingers were not.


While I was suffering from freezer burn, my mother was scouring cookbooks, women's magazines and the food section of the newspaper for new and exciting ways to get food into our gullets.

Flash forward to 2011 and parents have a treasure trove of recipe ideas to choose from. The food sections of newspapers are much better, more magazines are devoted to cooking, you've got tons of TV offerings from PBS to all the crap on the Food Network. And Then....there's the Internet. For better or for worse, it's a wild west show for food on the web. But it gets better for Mom because now there are cooking apps she can pull up a specific recipe on her Iphone while she's shopping at the grocery store.

Can't leave Martha home? She's got an app too.

And if Martha's got an app, the rest of the Celebrity Chefs can't be far behind.



Now I don't know about you but I'm not sure I want Gordon Ramsay or Mario Batali in my pocket.

Nigella Lawson on the other hand? Houston we have a GO!

So tell me my little crack monkeys, do you have cooking apps on your various electronic doodads? Would you pay ten bucks to have Mario at your beck and call?

7 comments:

the dogs' mother said...

I have yet to make the crossover to smartening my phone. But the idea of having a recipe to call up at the grocery store...

Big Shamu said...

I want a Bacon Locator App. One that tells me the closest place to get a plate of bacon at any given time.

MakingSpace said...

Oooh excellent question.

I have an app called Cooking School - it's a game for the kid to play when we're sitting at the other kid's dance class. No actual food is harmed in the making of this app. LOL

As for apps that help with food selection, I find most things too overwhelming. I used my kids as my app. We sat down and made lists of things they'd eat for breakfast, snack, lunch, and dinner. Then I printed that out (having suggested healthy options, promise) and it is posted on the fridge.

Then every two weeks I use that to make a menu. Print that out, put it on the fridge too and there we have it.

I guess it's an app, because I used electronic media to do it. But basically it was self-created and it lives on my laptop not my ITouch.

There you go. And yes, that last line sounded... well... Nigella-friendly?

the dogs' mother said...

Today I sent youngest son to the store. He forgot the list. Called me via his phone, told me to type the list into an email and send it to him.

One of my friends said she had one better. Her son asked someone to photograph the list off the white board and send it to his phone.

Big Shamu said...

Froggy, I've done the email recipe/list thing but only because that's how I collect recipes. Copy and paste in an email to myself. It's always easy to find as long as I label the subject matter well. Plus it helps that Whole Foods has free wifi for my doodad.

MS, that sounds like a smart way to go since if the little ones want to know what's for dinner, BAM there it is, right there on the fridge. Or just yell that you want chicken katsu long enough...

Dani said...

I'm in with Froggy.
If you know me well enough you know that Dani do phones of any kind. But I do have to be reached sometimes so I carry a little cheap pay as you go phone. Nothing cool like with apps.

MakingSpace said...

These people have been hollaring for chicken katsu for two days now. Grrrr