To accompany the launch of her Everyday Food cookbook, domestic queen Martha Stewart has rolled out the Martha’s Everyday Food: Fresh & Easy Recipes iPhone app (99 cents), incorporating the beloved recipes from her “Everyday Food” magazine. But this iPhone app doesn’t just provide tasty culinary treats, it aims to make life easier, too.
The iPhone app boasts thousands of recipes seen in “Everyday Food,” and you can browse by main ingredient, course, method or even special occasion. However, be sure to have all recipes selected, rather than quick dinner recipes, when you perform a keyword search—otherwise your results will be few. A new recipe is featured daily (you can be notified by push if you choose), along with tips from “Everyday Food” editors, such as why you should try the dish, how you can prepare it in advance or what ingredients can be swapped.
When you find recipes you like, you can save them to your favorites list, or add the ingredients directly to the shopping list, which sorts the ingredients into shopping aisles for you. Be aware that if you’re shopping for multiple recipes, the iPhone app will add staples such as salt and pepper to your list more than once. One of the more useful features of Martha’s Everyday Food is its integration with Web site Ziplist.com. Ziplist allows you to sync your shopping list, share it with family members and access it from anywhere, which makes it easy to pawn off the shopping chore to someone else. But, if you don’t want to register for Ziplist, you can still share your shopping list via in-app email.
Martha’s Everyday Food does have a few negatives. I don’t love the banner ads that appear between recipe ingredients and directions—this is a paid app, after all—but they are easy to scroll past and don’t hinder the iPhone app experience. The app also does not include nutrition information like the magazine, something I hope can be added in future updates.
