Keep in mind, before I start….just because I couldn’t get Julia Roberts to star in my blog post doesn’t mean that this will be any less inspiring than the movie!! 🙂
So, there’s this Food app (by Evernote) that I randomly discovered like a year or two ago. It helps keep track of your meals: the food that you like and where you got it from or how you made it. And, I don’t know about you guys, but I think that all that deliciousness in one app is a brilliant idea.
Essentially there are four options on the main menu of this app: Explore Recipes, My Cookbook, Restaurants, and My Meals. Most are pretty self-explanatory, but I’ll go ahead and run through each one.
Explore Recipes
This tab pretty much populates a list of random recipes (with pictures!! …because we all know pictures make you hungrier than words) so you can browse through and see what you like. These recipes are coming from all over the Internet, top recipes from food bloggers and publishers everywhere. I mean, come on, guys. Food isn’t something to joke around about. So with a serious (and by serious, I mean, seriously hungry) attitude, swipe your way through recipes and pics and see what you like. If you click on the recipes, the recipe will open up (as expected). However, on the top right, you can see a little scissor icon. That‘s the cooler part. Clicking that button will save the recipe to your Evernote account and add it to your Cookbook. You can choose what notebook it goes in, what tags it has so you can find it more easily later, and add your own personal notes to it. Oh, and if you slide down just a bit, there’s a search bar so you can narrow down your realm of food.
Which is the perfect transition to…
My Cookbook
My Cookbook is where all those recipes you clipped in the previous section while you were getting mouth-wateringly super hungry? Yeah. They were all saved here. So now you can just browse through your cookbook and not have to go through all the miscellaneous recipes that just weren’t cutting it for you. You can also directly add your own recipes here if you want through Evernote. (Create a note with the recipe and put it in the Food notebook and it’ll auto-add it to the Food app, under My Cookbook.)
And, on the days that you don’t feel like cooking, you have…
Restaurants
Yeah, sure. I know it’s not impressive that it lists the closest restaurants to you…but you know what is pretty sweet? It has all the information for the restaurant that you may need to refer to: like a website, phone number, see the menu, and even make a reservation using OpenTable. Not to mention ratings for each place, powered by FourSquare. Even though they’re just displaying information sourced from other places, I think it’s super convenient that they’ve accumulated it all into one app. And the scissor function exists here too, so you can save the restaurant to your Evernote, making it also accessible under the Saved sub-tab. And the last sub-tab is My Meals. So any meal that’s saved that has a restaurant location will show up here, organized by the restaurant. That was you can take pictures of your good-looking food, save it, remember what you ordered and what it tasted like, and know what to or what not to get next time you go there!
But that’s just for the restaurant meals, for all the rest there’s…
My Meals
My Meals is honestly just a place to record your meals. I’ve heard soooo many people complaining about so many people uselessly Instagram their meals. Well, here’s a chance to give your meal a photo shoot without alerting the entire world by posting it on Facebook and Twitter (although, you do have that option in Settings).
I think my favorite part of adding a meal when I first got this app was when it autofilled what meal it was based on the time. I don’t even know why I thought that was so cool…but it so totally was!
Anyways, so when you add a meal, you can add where it was, what cuisine it was, add tags so you can search for it later, any notes (maybe on what you’d change next time, anything!). Then you can add an entire album of pictures! I got the photography gene from my dad, so one lowly photo of food doesn’t quite satisfy me.
And, I guess since the My Meals part was probably the primary feature of this app, they have a plus sign on the main menu to quickly add a meal directly from the main screen.
Essentially, at the end of the day (or rather the end of this post), I’ve concluded that this app is cooler than I thought it would be. Even though I’ve had this app for probably over a year, I think I just discovered half of its features while writing this post 🙂 I was personally mesmerized by the My Meals. (I think I may need to reconsider my standards for coolness.) However, for now, go download this app and play around with it! It’s available for iPhones and Android, so NO EXCUSES…..unless you have a Windows Phone,Blackberry, or non-smart phone. Windows Phone is even acceptable, but if you have a Blackberry or non-smart phone, ummmm, I would like to welcome you to 2013 and highly suggest you connect to the clouds. ❤ Just let me know, I’ll hook you up.
Like, Totally Technical 