Weekend Cooking: 3 Mobile Apps for Recipes and Wine

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Welcome to another addition in the story of my never-ending efforts to maintain some sanity when it comes to finding recipes.

Most of us follow a few food blogs and keep a recipe board (or two or three) on Pinterest. Many of us still love cookbooks, and others read magazines and newspapers for new ideas. I do all of these. But I also rely on three apps: two for recipes and one for wine.

I've tried all kinds of foodie apps over the years, but I've stuck with only two of them because they provide generally reliable recipes and do exactly what I want them to, which is simply to help me find something to cook or bake.

I'm not that interested in shopping lists and ratings and maintaining yet another social media site. Just let me look up, say, "rhubarb desserts" and give me some options. Both of the following recipe apps do that for me. I'm sure there are all kinds of other features, but I don't use them.

Note that all three are available on Android and iOS and all are free (or at least the versions I use are free).

The New York Times Cooking app gives you pretty good access to all of the newspaper's recipes. It's easy to search for recipes by various keywords, such as ingredient, meal, course, or diet (vegetarian, low carb, etc.). You can also combine filters to run a more complex search: cinnamon + gluten free + dessert, for example gave me 8 recipes, including doughnuts! I've never used the other features, but you can save recipes to a personal recipe box, rate recipes, and sign up to learn to cook.

Since I got my very first apartment when I was undergraduate, I've been a big fan of both Gourmet (RIP) and Bon Appetit. Thus it was pretty much a given that I'd download the Epicurious app, which gives me access to decades worth of recipes from both magazines. The app works almost exactly like the Times app but my search for cinnamon + gluten free + dessert came up with over 100 recipes. Again, there are a handful of useful features, which I haven't used.

I've only just discovered the Vivino app, but it might be the answer to my wine app dreams. All I want is to have a searchable record of the wines we buy plus our ratings. I know, I could use Evernote or a journal, but after just two weeks, I like Vivino better.

Here's how it works: you take a photograph of the label, and the app searches its database for the wine. Once it finds a match, you can (among other things) rate the wine, add tasting notes, and record the cost. You can also see how other people have rated the wine, find food pairings, read information from the producer, and get an idea of the average price. The app isn't perfect, however; sometimes it misreads the label, but so far I've been able to manually edit the important information.

Although this is a social media app (I'm BethFishReads), I'm not using it that way. I'm just scanning in our dinner wine and adding a rating. It's fun to see where our tastes fit with other app users, and I've also checked the Vivino wine ratings while at the store so I can avoid bringing home a loser. It's too early to tell if I'll stick with the app, but so far, so good.

Do you use any mobile apps to keep track of your recipes, wine, or beer?