Salt and Pepperplate?

I love to cook!  I love trying a variety of recipes and experimenting with food combinations.  Cooking, baking — both are an art form.  For a long time, it was all about the cookbook – our sole introduction for new food experimentation.  But in this digital age, we have a larger “library” to choose from.  There are thousands of recipe sites and apps, and many of them with different functions – recipe sharing, recipe database, recipe photos, etc etc.

Currently, I have 5 recipe apps downloaded on my smart phone:

• Epicurious (app) and AllRecipe (app) for popular recipes;
• Evernote Food for capturing my glorious food creations;
• Allthecooks for sharing my masterpieces;
• And my most recent discovery, Pepperplate (app).

Of course, there are also various apps and sites for community-sharing which aren’t solely devoted to recipes, like Pinterest (my social media addiction) and Tumblr. However, Pepperplate has made all my recipe collecting much easier AND gives me the ability to access my recipes on my phone, tablet, and computer. It even gives me the ability to create menus, plan and share meals, and create shopping lists with my recipes by a simple click of a button.

So, how does Pepperplate work? Easy! First of course, you will need to create an account. You can login via Facebook or use your email address and create a password. Just copy the URL of a recipe from a Pepperplate supported site and paste it into Import Recipes from your computer. That’s it! The app will automatically import the recipe with the accompanied photo to your Pepperplate account, even separating the recipe ingredients and directions. You can create your own categories and tag each recipe you import with your chosen categories (i.e., Desert, Breakfast, Chicken, etc). Once your recipes are imported, you can access them on your phone or tablet. There’s even a Cook Now option on each recipe that allows you to set timers. No more having to set a separate timer on my microwave. I just take my tablet into the kitchen, click-click, and start cooking!

There are a million, bazillion recipe apps and sites on the web. How marvelous would it be for one company to create an app that will allow importing from all of those recipe websites? Maybe in 2015, but not in 2014.  Until then, Pepperplate has a good assortment of supported sites, such as FoodTV.com, Martha Stewart, Real Simple, King Arthur’s Flour, Allrecipes.com, La Cucina Italiana, Rachel Ray, Whole Foods Market, and so on.

You can also manually add your own recipes or recipes from unsupported sites. A simple copy and paste does the trick, and Pepperplate is sophisticated enough to format the content properly!  There is also a Bookmarklet available to plug into your Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Chrome and Firefox users for easy recipe importing.

Go download it and try it for yourself!  Pepperplate is available for iOS 7 and older, Android 2.1 and up, Windows 8.1 and older, Nook, and Kindle.  Happy cooking!

Dwan McClendon
Project Manager