This week's App Smart column was filled with tablet and smartphone apps that give you access to tens of thousands of recipes for all sorts of different meals. Many of the apps also try to help by giving you tools to aid with shopping.
But if, like me, you are still the proud owner of a pile of cookbooks and torn-out recipe pages from magazines, then you may want to preserve their contents in a more convenient digital format. There are great apps to help.
For example, the My Recipe Book app ($2 for iPad) is a powerful recipe database app. Its clear, straightforward interface lets you type in the details of a recipe you have in printed format, and you can even snap a picture of any photos included in the original print. It also lets you import recipes you find in online cookery pages. When you've populated it with recipes, you can search among them by category, name or the time it takes to make them. There's also a very sim ple grocery list function and handy tools like a metric-to-imperial weight convertor.
Digital Recipe Sidekick is a similar app that's free for Android. It is designed to let you edit and create recipes much like My Recipe Book, as well as importing them from the web. It's also got hands-free functions so you can command it by voice, and it'll read out steps from the cooking instructions. No sticky smartphone screens!
ChefTap is another free Android app that's more aimed at capturing recipes from Web sites. It has a powerful system that can identify a recipe and automatically import it into its database. It even connects with the sharing site Pinterest and can capture all the recipes in a list of favorites that a user has collected.
