I love to cook, and I love cookbooks. I don’t, as a rule, love recipes I find on the internet. Crowd-sourcing has no place in the kitchen, and those blogs where every recipe is prefaced by a photo essay about some woman’s feelings about fall, or whatever, make me want to gently rest my head inside the oven and close my eyes forever. (This threat was less idle when I had a gas oven.) I trust Deborah Madison. I do not trust Epicurious.
But for some reason, every cookbook does not come with a meal-planning app (WHY NOT WHY NOT), and since I’m a basically disorganized and poorly equipped human, sometimes I lose the gum wrapper on which I’ve written my shopping list, leaving the internet as the only recipe source at hand when I’m shopping for dinner.
For that eventuality, I just downloaded an app called Five Plates, created by Portlander Melissa Lion. (Full disclosure: Lion has freelanced for the Mercury in the past.) Five Plates is a meal planning app that pushes five new recipes to your iPhone every week. The recipes are adapted by Lion from pre-existing recipes, or are republished with permission; all have been tested, all use whole foods, and all take less than an hour to prepare.
“I am a freak about meal planning,” Lion says. “I love it because it means I can get fresh dinner on the table every night. And I hate it because it takes up too much of the little bit of free time I have. Five Plates is there to take the pain out of meal planning. If you just need a few ideas for weeknight meals, Five Plates provides that inspiration. If you want to just put your cookbooks and recipe cards away forever, Five Plates offers you a complete meal plan, with a grocery list for the week.”
It’s a slick little app: The ingredients for the week’s meals pop up on a shopping list, organized by what section of the store they’re found in (dairy, canned food, etc.) If you don’t like a recipe, you can skip it, and it removes those ingredients from the list; you can also save your favorites.
What I like about Five Plates is that the recipes are curated and sourced: This week, for example, its offerings include recipes adapted from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything (broiled chicken with cilantro) and The Splendid Table (roasted apples, pears, and sausage).
Five Plates isn’t going to replace my copy of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone or Plenty, and I’m unlikely to use it every week, but I’ll definitely get some use out of it—sure beats staring vacantly into the meat freezer at Sheridan, wondering if I should buy three pounds of goat bones.
The app is currently free to download for iPhone.
Any developer of Apps that doesn’t release an Android version is showing an amazing lack of foresight or planning. iOS market share has dropped by 10% year-over-year, and the trend isn’t stopping. http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/30/apples…
Thanks for the review Alison! Working without a background in dev, Melissa has worked hard to put something out there that may remove a few of the obstacles preventing families from preparing healthy meals at home.
@Graham Not to discount your research, but at launch, the meal provider in the majority of homes is Mom, and she is currently using iOS on an iPhone or iPad. That said, an Android version is down the road, but it costs money to build. Would you like to invest?
I would happily throw some bucks at a Kickstarter for an Android version. Currently I use a spreadsheet for meal planning, which is pretty clunky. This sounds like a great idea.
@TylerinCMYK: Actually, you’re wrong. Sorry. When broken down by demographic (age, gender, education, et al), Android ownership is largely higher than iOS and that divide is growing (except for rich, college-educated, white people over 65). I know that when you own an Apple device it can feel like that’s the whole world; but the research clearly doesn’t back up those conclusions. By not releasing Android versions of your App you are increasingly losing market share and kneecapping your own success.
http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2013/…
http://pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Repo…
@TylerCMYK: But in all honesty, if you were to do a breakdown of development time versus platform, a slightly okay argument can be made for the cost effectiveness of delivering on iOS only rather than a multi-platform strategy, but that’s generally an argument from laziness. Sure, there’s more variety in device types and specific flavors of Android version; but there’s always going to be some of this and it’s generally healthy for the whole environment to not have only one silo.
http://opensignal.com/reports/fragmentatio…
Is there any option to only get vegetarian meals? Or pescatarian, or whatever else?
That would be friggin’ awesome.
AS A VEGAN I USE ANDROID WUT
Home Run Meals (www.homerunmeals.com) is a web app that helps with meal planning. It works with android/iphone/desktop, and it will create meal plans for you based on your diet preferences (vegetarian, low carb, budget friendly, etc). It also provides a shopping list, coupons, and nutritional information.
Diet preferences are important.
Generalizing women are the majority who cook and use apple products is not data based is a horrible misnomer. Back to the 50’s we go.