For many busy young professionals fuelling success through food is always a challenge. Time is always constrained and the temptation to eat fast food is omnipresent. These five Smartphone apps will not only help choose great restaurants, but also help with select ingredients and recipes worthy of Mindthis readers. Enjoy!
YumYum!
Price: $0.99
YumYum! is the world’s first social network dedicated exclusively to food. This app allows users to snap, rate, and share dishes with friends. It allows a user to save their favourite restaurants and to get feedback from critical friends. The genius behind apps like YumYum! is they harness the power of peer recommendation and give businesses free passive marketing. The layout is simple, easy to use, and the app performs well enough. The major downside is that it is a paid app. The creators of YumYum! may be burned in the future if they continue to buck the trend and insist on even the small $0.99 charge for this fun app.
Who knew the British could cook? Seriously, Jamie Oliver is a stand up and cosmopolitan fellow. One cannot help but admire his healthy food initiative in British schools. His latest 20 Minute Meals App is a must for a busy working professional: on it are over 60 step-by-step recipes with helpful pictures to guide aspiring culinary masters on a time budget. A word of caution, you had better be making good money as this app comes with the hefty price of $6.99.
Urbanspoon
Price: Free
Urbanspoon is the granddaddy of all food applications. It’s well known, fun, and has a great amount of restaurants on it. One has the ability to filter restaurants based on neighbourhood, price or type of cuisine. For indecisive foodies it has a feature that randomly chooses a restaurant based on culinary type and price. As well, Urbanspoon incorporates reviews to make choices even easier. Finally, it has a cool “scope” feature that pops up nearby restaurants through a street view on your phone. Download this app because it’s free and everyone else is doing it!
Harvest
Price: $1.99
Harvest helps everyday shoppers select ingredients in grocery stores and it’s a nice addition to recipe apps like 20 Minute Meals. Select a food and Harvest will tell if it’s ripe and of good quality, as well it will also tell you how to store each food to keep it fresh for the longest period of time. Finally, it offers pesticide residue levels for each produce item for health-conscious consumers. A great purchase if you’re unsure of how to tell if arugula is actually fresh in store or spend hours knocking on watermelons.
BBC Good Food Quick Recipes
Price: $2.99
The British are really punching above their culinary weight! The Good Food apps are the incarnations of BBC’s food blog of the same name. On top of Quick Recipes other Good Food apps exist: Seasonal, Healthy and Festive, to name a few. Overall the Quick Recipe app contains over 175 recipes searchable by keyword, category, interchangeable measurements, a cooking timer and a favourite recipe option and five cooking skills videos. At a mere $2.99 it is a steal compared to Jamie Oliver’s app. This app is definitely worth the try.