Software & Apps

Maybe it’s because schools don’t really focus on Home Economics classes anymore (at least, it was far more subdued and simplified when I took it in Middle School), but “Meal Planning” utterly baffles me. When I was in Girl Scouts my troupe did some sort of Home Economics badge, and we were tasked with planning a schedule for evening family tasks: Dinner, chores, homework, etc. I was 12, naïve, and a Latchkey kid. So I planned 30 minutes for family dinner, which included 10 minutes to microwave dinner and 20 minutes to eat it.

Suffice it to say, no one is asking me to plan Thanksgiving Dinner.

The whole concept of shopping for a meal that has more than two dishes blows my mind. Forget about timing several dishes to be done cooking at the same time! And those people who can take a roasted chicken and stretch it out to a week’s worth of meals? I figure they must be tapping into unholy powers to manage that level of organization.

But maybe all hope is not lost for me. With Pepperplate, maybe I can make small steps into the land of “menus” with things like “side dishes” or maybe even “courses”. Now that I’ve amassed a decent number of recipes in Evernote, I can transfer them to Pepperplate and begin my transformation into a Domestic Goddess. Or maybe just someone who can plan an occasional dinner party.

Transferring recipes is relatively simple. The quickest and easiest method is if your recipe is from one of more than two-dozen popular cooking sites that allow you to import a recipe by URL. If not, you can just cut and paste the title, recipe and directions, and whatever other information might be of use to you. There are also fields for active and total time, yield, source or URL, categories, description and notes. You can import or create recipes from your desktop, iPad or iPhone.

Once you’ve input your recipes, things get exciting. The two features that were most exciting and useful to me, were adding the recipe to a planner or a shopping list.

When you add a recipe to a shopping list, you can do it to the recipe’s original scale, or you can choose to increase or decrease the recipe. Once you’ve made that choice, Pepperplate does some basic categorization by food types, which is intended to break your shopping trip down into aisles. If it’s unable to identify which group an item should go into, the app allows you to choose a category from a rather impressive list of options. If you decide that it makes sense to put an item that’s been pre-classified into a different category, you can easily move it there. The Pepperplate website allows you to customize things even further, including rearranging the order of the items and aisles, and creating your own aisle names.

Adding recipes to the planner is dead simple. Again, you choose the scale of the recipe. After that, you choose time of day (morning, mid-day or evening), plus day, month and year. When you view the calendar, Pepperplate will show you a list of all recipes in order of the time of day.

You need to use the iPad or the website to add menus. This is a little unintuitive in the current version, in that you must first create a blank menu before you can add recipes to it. But once it’s added, menus will sync with your iPhone (or Android device, if that’s how you roll).

When it comes time to cook your recipes, if you’re using an iPad it will keep your device from sleeping until you’ve indicated you’re done cooking. I thought this was a rather nice touch, as it keeps you from having to periodically poke your screen with possibly messy fingers to review the recipe. It also allows you to set a timer, which you can modify remotely with an iPhone. This could be handy if you’re sitting on the couch with your phone in your pocket, waiting for a dish to finish baking.

Pepperplate also gives you the standard methods for sharing your recipes: Twitter, Facebook, or email. You can print the recipes as well, if you prefer a hard copy.

You can find Pepperplate on the iOS App Store. The app is free, and you can sign in either by creating a free Pepperplate account or by connecting the app with Facebook.