Those who know me know I love to cook. No, make that I LOVE TO COOK. I grew up in an Italian household cooking alongside my mom and grandparents. At 7 years old I cooked my first pork roast. At 12 I built a new brick barbeque pit outside. Every Christmas Eve the house was filled with family and the Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes, a tradition I carry on today. I seriously thought about going to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY when it came time to choosing a college before deciding to go for a career in the video industry.
One of the biggest problems for me is keeping track of all my recipes. Not only family recipes passed down, but even those I find online. Bookmarking online recipes and storing printed recipes in files and such, well it became frustrating to find anything when I literally have 1000’s of recipes around.
2 years ago I found the Paprika Recipe Manager and holy cow, did that bring a complete change to how we store recipes, cook and shop. It works on pretty much every device and every OS which is great when you have Mac, Windows, Android and iOS devices in the house like we do. I have the app on my MacBook Air, Samsung Galaxy Tablet and my iPhone. Here’s what it looks like on the Mac.
Not only are all of my recipes stored in the app, but you can see everything is easily categorized, even with subcategories like you see in Dessert and Indian. My wife is a Vegetarian so for each cuisine I separate the Vegetarian dishes to make it super easy to find those.
The BEST part about this app is the Browser feature. It’s a built in web browser so I can search for and save online recipes directly within the app. Here I’m on the Food Network website and I searched for grouper and selected this great sounding recipe from Bobby Flay.
You see down on the bottom right of the page the “Save Recipe” button. Simply click that and….
Paprika grabs all the pertinent information to create a new recipe card in the app. I’m selecting Seafood from the drop down category list. Click “Save” and…..
I have the full recipe card ready to go including a funny picture of Bobby Flay and his cat. That was the only photo on the page so Paprika grabbed it thinking it was the photo of the plate. I can easily change that photo when I make the dish or go look for a photo of it. If the app can’t grab the recipe automatically you can go see in the earlier images the buttons for “Name,” “Ingredients,” “Directions” and so on at the bottom of the screen. This allows you to manually highlight the individual elements of the recipe on the page and automatically bring them into a new recipe. It’s quite easy for sites that for whatever reason won’t automatically import.
My wife found this AWESOME gooseneck tablet stand for the Samsung Galaxy tablet that we keep near the stove and use it like a cookbook stand. It keeps the tablet raised up off the counter so it’s out of the way of ingredients and the base weighs about 3 pounds so it’s solid and won’t get knocked over easily. It’s a universal stand so it works with multiple types of tablets.
Most recently I’ve been loading up a lot of mixology recipes as I have been exploring the wonderful world of cocktails. So if you like to cook or only cook on occasion, I highly recommend this app to get you organized and allow you to be more creative in your cooking.