Three Cooking Apps on My IPhone

When faced with the challenge of choosing what to make for dinner, I increasingly turn to my phone. With it, I can search by ingredient based on what's in the fridge, or plan a quick stop at the market on my way home from work.

Here are the three apps I use when planning my evening meal on the go.

One: How to Cook Everything for iPhone
Based on Mark Bittman's popular cookbook, How to Cook Everything for the iPhone offers thousands of recipes and variations, menu suggestions, reference materials, and illustrations.

Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything for the iPhone offers numerous simple recipes for home cooks. Many are appropriate for quick dinners. In fact, a navigation button allows cooks to browse recipes that can be prepared in 30 minutes or less.

My favorite, go-to recipes in this iPhone app are Mark Bittman's brownies (which can be made in one bowl with the help of a microwave), roasted whole chicken, no-knead bread, spaghetti with butter and parmesan, and beans and greens.

How to Cook Everything for the iPhone is also useful when faced with the "problem" of figuring out how to prepare unusual fruits and vegetables. Not sure how to peel a mango, but they're on special at the grocery store? No problem.

Extensive basic descriptions of basic cooking techniques are helpful. The kitchen timer built in to many recipes is not so much so, mainly because I use the kitchen timer on my stove.

Two: Big Oven
Big Oven is my favorite of the apps based on a large online recipe database. It offers a means to mark favorites, a "try soon" list, and a "leftover wizard" function that allows one to search the online database for specific ingredients.

The good news is that the Big Oven database includes more than 170,000 recipes, mainly submitted by home cooks. The bad news is that this is an unedited collection. Consequently, it's a very good idea to read the often-helpful comments from cooks who have tried the recipies before me. Big Oven can also be difficult when looking for recipes for a commonly made food: there are over 1,000 recipes for brownies.

Big Oven's iPhone app is particularly useful when searching for international or ethnic recipes, such as Singapore noodles or cholent. It can also be hellpful when coping with an unusal ingredient (e.g., menudo).

There is no nutritional information and no advice on basic cooking techniques.

Three: AllRecipes
The AllRecipes Dinner Spinner Pro, also on my iPhone, offers a similar large database of recipes submitted by home cooks.

Unlike Big Oven, AllRecipes offers nutritional information on the recipes in its databases. Recipes undergo some review before they are publicly shared.

As for Big Oven, the database is searchable by ingredient or recipe title, and users submit ratings. The spinner feature is a bit gimmicky, and it limits searches to the most common ingredients and courses.