Tag Archives: apps

Supercook__recipe_search_by_ingredients_you_have_at_home

Optimize Your Pantry: Using Supercook to Create a Menu

Supercook is an awesome little site.  If you’ve never tried it, what it does is help you find recipes using ingredients you specifically have on hand.  It’s great for a “Cook Your Cupboard” type thing, if you have ingredients sitting around that you’re not familiar with and don’t know how to use, or if you’re just looking for something new to try.  It can also help you save money by creating menus around sale items at your local grocery store.

Take your current grocery store sales circular.  For instance, I like to shop at Hiller’s, which is a local, southeast Michigan grocery chain.  I go through the circular and find main staple items that are on sale.  This week, I can see they have steak, greek yogurt, strawberries, chicken breast, portobello mushrooms, radishes, salmon, tortillas, cheese, sour cream, eggs, canned tuna and watermelon on sale.   I like most of those things; I almost never cook with radishes, though, so that kind of appeals to me as something new to try.  My goal here is to focus on these items, since they’re on sale, supplement them with a few things I always keep on hand (like rice and herbs/spices), and develop a dinner menu for the week that will give us healthy meals but also allow me to experiment a bit.Supercook__recipe_search_by_ingredients_you_have_at_home_and_Evernote So here I’d open Evernote and create a note with the list of items that are on sale and how much they cost.  If you prefer pen and paper, break out your trusty Livescribe pen or Evernote Moleskin notebook…or a sticky note or the back of a napkin, whatever works.

Now, go to supercook.com.  There’s an area called “My Kitchen” on the front page which lets you plug in specific ingredients, or you can choose them from a tag cloud in the center of the page.

I put in all the sale item ingredients and as I do that, it starts offering recipe suggestions that use at least one of those ingredients (and it tells you at a glance what other main ingredients you’ll need).  I can narrow down the results by category–for instance, dinner, salad, dessert, veggie, etc.  I can specify if I have a particular diet (i.e., gluten free, no dairy, etc).  I can also emphasize that I really want to use certain ingredients.

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In this case, I put in the foods mentioned above and sorted through the results.   I made a weekday menu consisting of the following meals:

  • Yogurt marinated grilled chicken with braised radishes
  • Brazilian style skirtsteak with watermelon-lime salad
  • Bloody Mary salmon with salt-baked potatoes
  • Yogurt chicken curry with rice
  • Salmon salad wraps with marinated portobello

So once I’ve got some dish options that I think will work, I list the week’s dinner menu in that same Evernote note where my initial grocery list was.  So now I have a grocery list of sale items, plus the dish I’m going to make with it and the day I’m going to make it.  And I can also do this for breakfast, lunch and dessert.

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Of course, the service isn’t perfect.  The interface isn’t the most gorgeous thing ever, it won’t have every single ingredient you can think to put in, and not every suggestion has pictures or is going to be something you really want to eat.  But it’s a great start for figuring out a menu cheaply and trying some new things.

Anyway, give it a shot–it might just help you organize your shopping, utilize your pantry more effectively and still experiment with delicious new dishes.

Supercook

 

Photo Jun 27, 8 54 10 PM

App You Need: Wolfram Alpha’s Culinary Mathematics

Wolfram Alpha is an eccentric genius trapped in a small box known as the internet  a completely non-human computational engine.  It can do your calculus homework–I mean, it can help you learn math, statistics, physics, culture, geography, music and even…help you cook?

Wolfram Alpha, in addition to apps for music theory, calculus, chemistry and a bunch of other things I didn’t really study in school (coughfilmmajorcough), also has an app to help the culinarily minded and curious amongst us: Culinary Mathematics (sorry Droids, iOS only at the moment).

Why this is cool:

  • You can calculate the nutritional information of individual foods or entire meals on the go.
  • You can access dietary recommendations for individual vitamins and minerals.
  • Perform cooking calculations while you’re busy in the kitchen.  For instance, a recipe calls for a certain volume of flour.  How much is that by weight?  Or the recipe is using metric ingredients and you’re a crazy imperial-system-using American.  You could convert those yourself by why, when you can have a super fancy calculator do it for you?
  • Research food economics—how much does food cost in your area versus another?  How much chocolate is consumed in say, my town versus yours?  Fun food trivia for the whole family.
  • Calculate the cost of food per unit, portion or even usable yield.  This makes party planning so much easier.  Trying to figure out how much food you need to buy to feed 40 people at a family holiday brunch, a graduation celebration or a semi-formal grilled cheese dinner party?  Now you can figure out how much you’ll need to buy per person, including the trimmed or unusable portions of food, and how much it’ll cost you.  Yay for planning!

Where you can get it:

 

Moves - fitness app

Fitness Apps: How they keep you motivated!

Depending where you live, June is a month where the weather starts to get a lot nicer and more people are getting outside. Walking is a great way to get your day started or even finih it off so you can burn those “desert calories”. Fortunately for most, walking is a pretty simple activity that requires little equipment. In a way, you just get up and go!

As an online fitness coach, I’m always looking for ways to use technology to help people be more active. Since most people nowadays have a smart phone and carry it with them everywhere, it can be a great too for tracking your fitness. Do a quick search in the app store and you’ll find many apps that are great for tracking your walking and even steps throughout the day.

One if these apps I’ve been testing out lately is called Moves. It uses the accelerometers of the phone to track your steps and the GPS to track where you go. It connects Foursquare, a location tagging program, that allows you to check in and get recommendations for the places you visit. This combination allows you to accurately track where you go each day. They’ve also done a pretty good job with their display, so at the end of the day you see where you’ve been, how long it took, how many steps you took and even how far you’ve travelled. Like magic, it even seems to know when I’m cycling!

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However, tracking where you’ve been and how many steps is only great if you’re actually walking and going places. The key is how will this app motivate you to keep moving?

When it comes to motivation, it’s all about goals. If you don’t know your destination, how motivated are you to get up and start walking? I suggest setting a daily, weekly and even monthly goal for your tracking in Moves. This can be the minimum steps or miles you want to achieve daily. I suggest aiming for at least 5000-7500 steps per day to start. Once this goal is set, check in to the app daily to see how you’re stacking up. Some days you’ll find that you blow your goal out of the water, while other days may require a late night walk just to get your minimum.

Bottom line, apps can be great tools for tracking your fitness, but if you’re not setting goals, you won’t stay motivated to use them and push yourself.

Have you used Moves? What do you like most about it?