If you enjoy cooking or simply have to cook out of necessity, you’ll want to have at hand lots of good recipes. Whether you obtain your recipes from friends, cookbooks, online sources, or put together your own concoctions, you’ll be glad to have a single place to store them. My Recipe Book – Your recipes, finally organized by Cross Forward Consulting is certainly one good place.

Review
The iPad is a handy device to take into the kitchen; it’s mobile and more convenient than a laptop, yet you won’t have to squint to read off the screen. This thus is the perfect device to be coupled with My Recipe Book – Your recipes, finally organized.

With My Recipe Book, you can with little effort import recipes from some of the most popular websites (currently numbering 12 within the app). And should your favorite website not be included, you can still bookmark it and use the custom import feature, which allows you to basically copy and paste fairly easily. You can also add new recipes manually by entering the ingredients, directions, etc. It’s naturally a little more labor intensive, but the app remembers past ingredients used and makes the process as friendly as possible. Another way to import new recipes is to exchange them via email with friends who also own the app.

One great aspect about the app is that it truly does do a good job of helping you organize your recipes, for it makes them very searchable. Each recipe may be assigned to more than one category. While this allows you to view all the items within a category with only two taps, you may also search for any keyword within a recipe. If you have only a limited time to spend in the kitchen, you can search for suitable recipes by their Ready Time. Some other useful features the app offers include a favorites list, recipe queue, grocery list, multiple cooking timers, unit conversions, and “Surprise Me” to delight you with random recipes.

My Recipe Book is indeed a fabulous kitchen companion, one that you might not want to be without once you’ve had it. It isn’t absolutely perfect yet, though its “weaknesses” are very minimal. First, a few extra features are tucked away in the Help section, which may be a bit of a stumbling block to those who aren’t naturally inclined to look for help. A more appropriate label for the “Help” menu button would be “Settings” or an appropriate icon. Anyhow, it is to “Help” that you’ll have to venture in order to add or edit categories. It’s also here that you can access options to backup or restore data through iTunes. Second, when entering a recipe manually, I sometimes found myself wishing I could do so on my Mac. This could perhaps be accomplished through a wifi-enabled web server function to link the app with the computer. The lack of such a feature isn’t a flaw, but it sure would be useful.

Finally, although I said the iPad is the perfect cooking companion, I still do wish I could have the same recipes at hand in my iPhone, which I carry about with me practically all the time. So I dearly hope My Recipe Book could evolve into a universal app with cloud-based syncing. I’m sure other My Recipe Book fans would say the same.

Recommendation
If you’re a cook, whether in your home or professionally, you will more likely than not come to love My Recipe Book – Your recipes, finally organized. Should you not already have an app that lets you manage your recipe collection, this is a must buy, especially at its very reasonable price of $2.99 in the App Store.

Photos

Note: A promotional code was provided by the creator for use in this article.

Please post your comments, tips, and your own reviews below in the comments area!

Tweet