Tuesday, January 03, 2017

What's Your Favorite Recipe App and/or Dinner Box Service?

I enjoy cooking, and try to eat healthfully, but having a full-time job makes dinner planning and prep a challenge. The Sergeant can be persuaded to make pasta or sandwiches on occasion, but his passions lie elsewhere.

Recipe App

I recently discovered Pepperplate (via Cool Tool's Recommendo newsletter, which you should sign up for). 

Pepperplate is a recipe app that lets you import recipes from anywhere on the Web, sometimes automagically and sometimes manually, but without much fuss.

It has some bugs (their help section is broken, which is a major fail), and it requires some back-and-forth between laptop and phone/tablet, but if you're willing to put in a little up-front effort, you can get all of your favorite recipes in one place, complete with a shopping list feature and the ability to scale up and down. 

There's a bookmark-type widget you can add to a browser so you can snag any recipes you run across on the Web, which is very handy, when it works.

I'm not damning with faint praise here; I really do like this app, and I am looking forward to them ironing out the kinks. It's a very clean and good-looking interface, fairly intuitive to use and super-convenient for me.

Where do you find your favorite recipes? How do you save/store them?


Dinner Boxes

A couple of years ago, we subscribed to Blue Apron and got dinner boxes once or twice a month, but after a while it felt like a lot of work for meals that seemed pretty bland. We also tried Plated; it was OK; I don't remember why we didn't stick with them longer.

Hello Fresh was good until a shipment of chicken that was Hella NOT Fresh, and their customer service was unreachable. (They finally got back to me after I posted on social media about it; I'd already canceled my subscription.)

And with all those dinner box service, there's all that packaging! It was appalling, though I tried to reuse or recycle as much as possible.

Do you have a dinner box service you like? It's been a year since we used any of them and I'm thinking we might try again, just to see if the experience has improved.



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