Info 202 F12

A day in the life of D:

me:  What’s for
dinner?

me:  um… I don’t know.  What’s in the fridge?

me:  Eh, I’ll just have cereal… : (

Although I’m sure your pre dinner internal dialogues differ from mine, the challenge of meal planning is prolific.   Time constraints, lack of cooking experience or ability may make planning for a meal an insurmountable task wrought with
hunger pains, frustration, and the preconditions for an ulcer, followed by shame and a grilled cheese sandwich.  In
the NY Times article “A Shelf Full of Cookbooks at Your Fingertips” by Kit Eaton describes a couple technological solutions to the big question of your day.

The article discusses the features of two mobile applications, Big Oven and Epicurious, which provide a collection of thousands
of recipes to the hungry or soon to be.  Now, you may think more isn’t better when it comes to choice but the
difference is in how the recipe, or resource, is retrieved.  For the most part the large collection is latent and is navigated by search or category.  For instance, Big Oven provides 250,000 recipes with the main interface being search.  The search feature provides many avenues for quickly finding the food you’re in the mood for or the pragmatic “leftovers” feature, which might help you, finish the produce in your fridge before it rots.  Epicurious takes an alternate approach and suggest categories.  A couple of examples of a category provided is “novice cook  or pressed for time.”  Each recipe app has it’s own underlying organizational structure but each allows the user a just in time approach to getting their dinner recipe.

Both applications have features to create shared grocery lists, and for those with commendable skill the ability to create a menu calendar.  Recipes can be uploaded and voted on to help manage your personal recipes as well as remember those gems you stumble across. The collating of recipes, and the functionality to effectively plan for meals might save me from a few save me from a few sad bowls of macaroni and cheese or frozen pizza but it may not.  One thing is for sure it would
alleviate the need to keep an organized bookshelf of cookbooks at hand.