I am an avid reader of Real Simple magazine, and I love the recipes. They’re usually very easy and interesting, and I’ve found several great ones over the last couple of years. So, when I saw that Real Simple had an iPad recipe app, I decided the $4.99 was worth it, even though I already pay for a magazine subscription.
Thankfully, I read the reviews first, and let me tell you, they weren’t pretty. Most of them were complaints about the ads Real Simple runs on the paid app. Why they run ads on a paid app, I don’t know. But I do know I can’t stand ads, which meant the Real Simple recipe app wasn’t for me.
While reading through the reviews, a couple of people mentioned an app called Paprika, which copies recipes directly from Real Simple (and other websites). It sounded interesting, so I did some research. Here are the deets that were interesting to me:
- Price: $4.99
- Captures recipes from popular recipe sites such as RealSimple.com (view the complete list)
- Lets you organize recipes by category, which you can customize
- Lets you schedule meals
- Lets you specify and load ingredients to a shopping list
I’ve been using it for a month or two now, and I love it. Since I was using the old fashioned method of looking through books, writing down recipes/ingredients, Paprika has been a huge time saver. I wish I’d bought it months ago! Plus, now I can toss all the old Real Simple magazines I’d been keeping because I liked the recipes. Bonus for a clutter-fiend like me :)
I did research some other popular recipe apps, but none of them looked as robust, and I really like how Paprika captures online recipes. Most of my research consisted of reading other blog posts about recipe apps and then reading some of the reviews on iTunes.
In summary, Paprika does everything a reluctant cook needs.