One of the apps I got acquainted with on this journey is Foodie Recipes, a free iPad app that’s both beautiful, diverse and seasonally relevant. Foodie Recipes is based on the website foodie.com, but is not merely a mobile version of the website. Rather, Foodie Recipes offers a recipe magazine of sorts, which aggregates the best seasonal recipes from food bloggers and professionals from all over the world. Each edition of Foodie Recipes has a different theme, with dozens of easy-to-follow recipes for you to prepare.

When I say Foodie Recipes is free, I mean it. Not only is the app free, not only is the current edition free, but all past editions are also free, which easily brings you to over 150 curated recipes for all kinds of dishes suitable for different times of the year.

Spring Flavor

The current edition available on Foodie Recipes is Spring Flavor, which includes 40 recipes for spring-themed appetizers, drinks, soups, salads, small plates, pasta, main dishes, sweets, and preserves. Each recipe comes from a different contributor, which makes for a pretty diverse collection of recipes.

The app is built much like a magazine, with an editor’s note at the beginning, and one recipe and image per page. There are several ways to navigate through the app: flipping through recipes by tapping, jumping through them using the visual toolbar at the bottom of the screen, or using the collapsible table of contents on the left.

The Spring Flavor edition includes recipes ranging from super easy ones (deviled eggs, strawberry and avocado salad, grilled baby artichokes), to intermediate ones (broiled salmon with rhubarb salsa, chocolate-covered strawberry pie), to special occasion ones (lamb curry meat pie with minted peas, chickpea cakes with shaved asparagus and yogurt, key lime pie marshmallows). Each recipe comes with one image of the finished product, an ingredient list, and step-by-step directions, as well as prep time, cooking time, and yield.

The recipes are easy to follow and clear, but if you’re a complete beginner, you’ll find that they don’t exactly teach you how to cook. Most of these recipes are aimed at people who cook from time to time or like cooking, and are looking to expand their usual repertoire.

Unlike the Foodie website, there’s currently no way to bookmark recipes, add them to a recipe book, or mark them in any other way. You can, however, share a favorite recipe on Facebook or Twitter, email it to yourself or someone else, or print it straight from the app (requires AirPrint).

More Editions

Foodie Recipe’s offering doesn’t end with one edition, though. To date, Foodie has released four different editions for its iPad app: Spring Flavor, Romantic Meals, Game Day Guide, and Holiday Deserts. Some of these, such as the Romantic Meals edition, even come with an amusing video helping you set up the mood for a romantic Valentine’s day dinner.

To access these extra editions, tap the “Contents” button on the top left to expand the table of contents. Below the names of the different sections, you’ll find the “Editions” button. Tap an edition to start downloading it for free.

Each edition contains 40 recipes from a range of sources, showing you how to make everything from bourbon and ginger cupcakes or vanilla carrot soup, to stuffed pizza mushrooms, and bourbon and cider turkey meatballs.

A new edition of Foodie Recipes is released every couple on months, so you can always look forward to new and surprising recipes on the same stunning interface. Best of all the app has no intrusive adverts and won’t keep nagging you to buy in-app purchases to unlock content – this is one truly free app to help discover your inner chef.

Foodie Recipes is a great source of recipes, but doesn’t provide any way to collect or manage your recipes. If you’re looking for a recipe manager, Paprika Recipe Manager is worth a look. And as always, don’t forget to check out our Best of iPad Apps page for more recommendations you can make use of.

Download: Foodie Recipes on iTunes (Free)

Do you like Foodie Recipes? Is there another foodie app you’d like to recommend? Tell us all about it in the comments!

The post Enjoy 160+ Free Recipes At Your Fingertips With Foodie Recipes For iPad [iOS] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

What’d you have for breakfast this morning? How about two weeks ago? And hey, remember that time you and your friends went to that really fancy Japanese restaurant? If you’re a bit fuzzy on the last two questions (or even on the first), Evernote Food is a great way to answer them. I covered Evernote Food for Android before, when all it could do was log your meals. Now it’s time to give it another look, thanks to an all-new version that adds fun ways to track down new recipes and restaurants, as well as a fresh new look.

We’re big fans of Evernote here at MakeUseOf: We’ve previously shown you why you should be using it to remember everything, five uses for its desktop clients, as well as ten unique uses for Evernote itself. But even if you’re not so big on the core Evernote service, Evernote Food can be used on its own, and you don’t even have to have Evernote installed on your device.

Getting Started and Exploring Recipes

Evernote Food does a good job laying out its main features as you launch it:

Right off the bat, two things become obvious: It’s a beautiful app, and it lets you work with recipes, restaurants, and meals. Let’s dig into the Explore Recipes screen:

This mouth-watering screen pulls in recipes from a selection of food blogs (preconfigured with Evernote Food — those are some lucky food bloggers). The “huge thumbnail” aesthetic shown here carries through the rest of the app, as you will see later in the meal log. Tapping into a recipe, however, yields a disappointing result:

Evernote Food simply serves up the original website, making no attempt to summarize it or even apply a phone-friendly layout (like Pocket does so well). Reading the recipe off a phone screen will involve lots of zooming and panning, and is really not that great of an experience. Zoomed in, the text becomes a scosh more readable, at the expense of cropped graphics:

Tiny indeed. So yes, you can find new recipes using Evernote Food, but you’d be better off reading them off a tablet or a computer monitor. Fortunately, this is easy to do, because Evernote Food lets you clip those recipes to your own cookbook. Tap the familiar elephant icon in the top-right corner, and Evernote Food shows the clipping screen:

By clipping the recipe, you will be able to access it from any other Evernote client (not just Evernote Food).

Finding and Clipping Restaurants

Evernote Food also includes a new screen for searching and clipping restaurants you’d like to eat in. Powered by Foursquare, you can use the feature both for searching nearby restaurants, and to prepare for an upcoming trip. Here’s a search for restaurants around London:

An individual restaurant’s screen looks like this:

It has pretty much everything you’d expect: The name, a Foursquare rating, a map and an address, a phone number, and sometimes even a few tiny images (which cannot be resized). Notably missing are reviews, but that’s understandable: Evernote is very much an individual experience, and by including crowdsourced social reviews the company would risk muddling its focus. Still, this limits the restaurant’s screen usefulness: If you’re serious about finding some good eating, you may have to use Evernote Food in combination with a tool like Urbanspoon or one of these other helpful apps for deciding where to eat.

The Heart of The App: Logging Meals

New features notwithstanding, Evernote Food’s raison d’être is logging meals. Whether you enjoy logging only special meals with friends or, like me, you use it as a diet log to record all of your meals, Evernote’s meal logging feature is the most mature part of the app, and remains pleasantly polished in this new release. This is what an individual meal looks like:

You get plenty of fields to fill in, as well as automatic location tagging (which you can toggle off if you wish). New to this version, you can now pull down a gripper below the image to reveal a full-size photo:

Evernote’s meal browser uses the same layout as the recipe browser, and the wide, generous thumbnails are just as effective:

These are all photos I took with my own phone during routine use, and I can’t help but admire how nice Evernote Food makes my food look. Yes, I like chocolate — who doesn’t, really?

Making The Most Of Your Free Space Quota

I’d like to end off with one important trick. As a free Evernote user, you get a monthly storage quota of 60MB. If you use Evernote Food several times every day, this can fill up very quickly: A full-resolution 8MP image can easily take over half a megabyte. Fortunately, Evernote Food lets you pick what resolution you want the built-in camera to use:

If you go to the Settings screen and then pick Image Options, you’ll be able to set Image Size to Small (640×640). This is a completely adequate resolution for documenting your meals, and even for sharing particularly nice photos. If you intend to print photos of your food you might want to go for a higher resolution — but for most other use cases, 640×640 would be plenty. And photos at this resolution take up just a fraction of the space they’d otherwise take, stretching your 60MB monthly quota that much farther (in about a year of using Evernote Food, I have yet to hit my monthly quota even once).

Is Newer Always Better?

I can’t say I love all of the new additions in this version of Evernote Food. The new features are of limited use: One lets you browse recipes but doesn’t make it easy to actually read them, while the other lets you browse restaurants but doesn’t include diner reviews.  So, in the feature department, I’d have to say Evernote Food now suffers from a bit of bloat.

On the plus side, the new look works very well, and Evernote Food is a pleasure to use and browse. It remains my food log of choice on Android.

Do you log your meals? Do you use Evernote Food, or another app? Let me know below.

The post Evernote Food: A Beautiful Way to Keep Track Of Your Favorite Meals, Recipes, and Restaurants [Android] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

The culture and prevalence of tea and coffee throughout the world is an interesting topic and so is the history and science behind the beverages. We make no secret of our love for caffeine fixes here at MakeUseOf, and we’ve even gone as far as giving away a Bosch coffee machine, and that’s why today’s Stuff to Watch is best enjoyed with a hot drink of your choice.

I’ve managed to find 8 of the best tea and coffee themed videos on the web, so stick the kettle on and have a well-earned break while working through this list.

Tea Making Tips

In 1941 the British (and much of the world) was at war with Nazi Germany, but somehow they still managed to find time to make this public service announcement called “Tea Making Tips”. And who else but the British would create such a film? At just under 10 minutes long it’s a crash-course in making the perfect cup of tea.

The film has one main message – there’s no secret to making the perfect cup of tea, just a few pointers. At a time of war, massive loss and heavily rationed supplies making the most of what you had was an important part of life. If your tea-making skills leave little to be desired, watch this and become enlightened, 1940s-style.

Documentary: Tea and Coffee Society (Iran)

It would be wrong to assume it’s only the Commonwealth countries that drink tea on an almost religious scale, and another society that takes its tea very seriously is Iran. The film traces the route of coffee from the empire Iran once held to the first coffee plant exported to Brazil. The film isn’t heavy on dialogue, in fact there is no narration whatsoever.

Instead the film skips from one teahouse to the next, and offers an interesting glimpse into another culture’s love affair with hot beverages.

Epic Tea Time with Alan Rickman

As part of a series called Portraits in Dramatic Time by David Michalek, Alan Rickman of blockbuster fame (come on, Snape and the bad guy from the original Die Hard) is seen making a cup of tea and subsequently destroying it in dramatic slow motion.

The video series was initially created as part of a festival in 2011 and each was projected onto the Lincoln Center in New York City, though the whole series has yet to make it online. Come on David, let’s see the rest!

Coffee: The Greatest Addiction Ever

Believe it or not, coffee powers much of the Internet including this and many of your other favourite sites. While tea is the lubricant that keeps many of us working into the afternoon, without coffee mornings would probably be a write-off. I’m speaking for myself here, of course, but I’d like to drag a few others down with me.

If you’re also a coffee-lover by design, you’ll enjoy getting your fix in video form with this 3-minute long film that should teach you everything you need to know about nature’s best caffeinated beverage.

This is Coffee!

It was the English who made many of the first tea-themed public service films and who better to pay homage to coffee in similar form but America. This film was not just created by any old organisation – this is the work of the US Coffee Brewing Institute.

Released in 1961, this sepia-toned PSA is a celebration of the strong stuff. Best of all it’s free to download, keep or remix into your own projects as part of the Prelinger Archives, so grab it here.

How To Drink Tea or Coffee In Space

Remember Don Pettit? He was the astronaut who spent around 6 months on the International Space Station, filming various zero-gravity experiments and documenting the life of an astronaut in general. His footage was so good I put together a Don Pettit-themed Stuff to Watch, featuring a video which I’m going to show again – drinking coffee in space.

This method would work for both tea and coffee, though only coffee is shown here. Your coffee addiction looks a little more pedestrian if NASA’s not prepared to send its astronauts into space without some fresh ground inspiration.

Coffee Science

An incredibly sweet and entertaining look at the job of a barista, from deciding what a coffee should taste like to what to charge and how to best brew the coffee. If you weren’t aware of the incredible detail that goes into a fine cup of coffee, this 5-minute documentary is for you.

Tealand, A Tea Documentary

With a few simple tips you can brew the perfect cup of tea at home, so why would you want to go to a tearoom? This documentary takes a look at the revival of the tea house in Britain, exploring old pre-Victorian buildings to businesses who try to keep as much to the original ethos of a tearoom as possible.

Also featured is Manchester’s monthly music night run by DJ and producre Mr Scruff, an evening that plays trip hop, funk and breakbeat while selling tea to revellers and raising some money for charity at the same time.

Alt titles:

Team & Coffee Lovers Unite: 8 Videos For Caffeine-Addicts [Stuff to Watch]
Keep Calm and Make A Brew: 8 Videos Celebrating Tea & Coffee [Stuff to Watch]
Celebrate Your Tea & Coffee Addictions With These 8 Videos [Stuff to Watch]
Put The Kettle On & Celebrate Your Tea or Coffee Addiction With These Videos [Stuff to Watch]

The post Stick The Kettle On! 8 Videos That Celebrate Tea & Coffee [Stuff to Watch] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

No more. Fork the Cookbook is an unusual take on the idea of a cooking application. It is the GitHub for recipes with “version control”. With Fork the Cookbook, it is all about the evolution of food – how you can adapt, change, modify, or tweak every time to come up with interesting variations. It makes the cooking (and sharing) experience a bit easier.

GitHub for Recipes

We take a humbling view that humanity will be richer when we can learn from one another. Instead of wasting time, money and energy reinventing the wheel, innovate on existing recipes to make them even better. After all, you see farther by standing on the shoulders of Giants

Fork the Cookbook draws inspiration from an Open Source repository site like GitHub. GitHub is a collaborative project hosting platform where programmers share and modify code freely – a modus operandi that defines “forking”. Think of it as a social network for developers. So, just why are we talking about GitHub while discussing recipes?

It is because Fork the Cookbook uses the same spirit of sharing and collaboration to improve upon what we cook. The idea is that users can modify any recipe or one contributed by another member and create their own version. To ‘fork’ is a term borrowed from Open Source software development where you can take something original and work on the copy in your own way to create something new. Someone else can take your creation and further reinterpret it with their own ideas. So, in a sense the original creation keeps mutating and evolving.

Like GitHub, Fork the Cookbook is also your personal recipe scrapbook to keep track of your favorite recipes and any modifications you make to the recipes.

What Makes It Different From Other Cooking Websites?

The moment you land on the homepage and go beyond it, you will appreciate the thought that has been put into the design. Unlike run-of-the-mill cooking sites, Fork the Cookbook is refreshingly minimal. It is NOT a social network for food lovers. It is simply about food and how you can innovate around it with your own mix of ingredients.

The developers say that the site is built around three simple actions – adding a recipe, editing a recipe, and forking a recipe.

Sign In and Say Yum to The Recipes!

Signing up to the site is also different. You just give them an email ID to receive an alphanumeric code. Create a profile name. You can stay logged in or repeat the process when you next come to the site. The thoughtfully designed interface greets you with lip-smacking photos of food. Explore the recipes by clicking on the large photos with words that are a mouthful, like pretzel-crusted honey mustard chicken breasts and spaghetti amatriciana style with dry italiana sausage.

The recipe page opens in full galore. As you can see, attention has been paid to the readability. The layout is crisp and the essential details are clearly displayed. You will not find step-by-step illustrations but what you will get are clear cut instructions. Quiet a few recipes have been contributed by food bloggers and so will have professional write-ups which you can read by clicking the ‘Write-up’ hyperlink.

Forking a Recipe

It’s what you do with a recipe that’s the interesting part. Forking is at the core of the site, so hit the pink button if you have some extra dash of ingredients to add to the original recipe. As shown in the screenshot below, Fork the Cookbook asks you to follow a simple syntax as you begin adding your own ingredients and modifying the dish to your taste. Oh, you can give the name your own spin too.

Add a few more details (number of servings, time to cook, difficulty etc.) in an optional screen and fork the recipe. The recipe gets added to your personal notebook. You can embellish the recipe with a beautiful photo, and then share it with the wider world if you want.

Adding Your Own Recipe

You can add your original recipes to your personal cookbook and allow others to fork it. Do note that forking does not require express permissions. Fork the Cookbook prefers you follow the basic syntax as explained in the steps.

There Is No One True Recipe

This is almost the catchphrase of Fork the Cookbook and one you can believe in. The web application is almost simple in the way it goes about things – you discover new recipes and also invent your own. As a specific recipe gets forked repeatedly, your personal cookbook could grow to teach you how to make many more variations of the recipe you started out with. The end result could be the perfect recipe you couldn’t have imagined.

Personally, I am interested to see how many variations I can spot for low-carb meals. What about you? Fork the Cookbook is a freshly served cooking application, but do you like the trajectory it is on?

The post Start Forking: Open Source Inspiration Comes To Cooking & Recipes With Fork The Cookbook appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Owning an iPad has changed the way I cook and bake in my kitchen. If before I used to copy recipes down or run back and forth from the kitchen to my computer, I can now load everything on my iPad, place it in the closest spot where it still wouldn’t get dirty, and cook to my heart’s content.

In order to cook with your iPad, you need some good recipe sources, that’s for sure, but not every recipe is equal to the other, and not every cooking app is the same as the next one. While some cooking apps are nothing but recipe managers or collections of general recipes that are never quite clear enough, good results will come from cooking apps that actually teach you how to cook.

Ready to impress your family/friends/significant other with your amazing home-made food? Read on and get cooking!

Epicurious Recipes (Free, $1.99)

Epicurious is a well-known cooking website, and its iPad app doesn’t fall far from the tree. Yes, Epicurious is definitely a treasure trove for recipes, but for the beginner cook it’s so much more than that. Unlike many recipe apps that provide an ingredient list and some half-hearted instructions, every recipe you’ll find on Epicurious’s iPad app comes with very detailed instructions, and a very specific ingredient list. So where a different recipe might say “brown the lamb in a skillet”, Epicurious will include a whole paragraph.

When looking for recipes, you can search by category, keyword, and even by adding ingredients you have at home to see what you can make using them. Another great feature is the ability to add a recipe you want to prepare to your shopping list, and automatically get a list of everything you have to buy, divided into categories. If you tend to get overwhelmed just by looking at recipes, this feature can be a huge help.

If you already use Epicurious.com and want to sync your recipe box from the website, you will have to purchase an upgrade for $1.99.

Cooking (Free)

The title of this post starts with “not just recipes”, so I felt it would be appropriate to include a cooking app that comes with absolutely none. Cooking is all about helping you reach good results with recipes you already have, teaching you about good replacements for missing ingredients, cooking terms you may not be familiar with, and changes you should make in high altitudes.

If your recipe calls for half a cup of diced celery, and you’re not sure how much to dice, Cooking will help you there too, with its Yields & Tips section. It also provides a thorough converter for every measurement you can think of, including ice-cream scoops, beer barrels, smidgens, and more.

All in all, Cooking is not your conventional cooking app, but it’s going to be very helpful for preparing any recipe, no matter where you’ve found it.

Look & Cook (Free or $1.99)

Look & Cook is hands down the most beautiful cooking app I’ve ever seen for the iPad. This is not your usual recipe collection, where you can search by keyword or ingredient. Rather, the app includes only 44 recipes (two in the free version, but you can get an overview of all of them before buying the full version), divided into seven categories: everyday, breakfast, with the guys, barbecue, picnic, romantic, and dinner party.

The recipes themselves come with a visual overview of all the ingredients and the final product (the “Look” part), and a cook-book like step-by-step recipe (the “Cook” part). If you’re worried about having to flip through the recipe’s pages with dirty cooking hands, simply turn on voice activation to turn pages by saying “next” and “back”.

The Look & Cook recipes are not necessarily for beginners, and are definitely not for the lazy. Even the so-called everyday recipes have long prep times. If you already have some experience cooking and want to bring yourself to the next level, Look & Cook is a beautiful and detailed way to do this, impressing all your friends along the way.

How To Cook Everything ($9.99)

If you’re truly serious about learning to cook, and feel that a $10 app is a reasonable investment, How to Cook Everything is probably the most celebrated cooking app available for the iPad. The app does have a free version you can try, but as its only available for the iPhone, you’ll have to make do with a smaller screen if you intend to use it on your iPad.

How to Cook Everything is based on a cookbook of the same name written by Mark Bittman, and includes 2,000 recipes and hundreds of how-to illustrations like the one you can see in the screenshot above. Like Epicurious, How to Cook Everything helps you shop for the right ingredients, and also includes an in-app timer, so your food doesn’t burn in the oven.

There’s lots to explore in this app, but the price tag is still a little steep. If you’ve tried all other apps and still can’t find the right one for you, or if you absolutely love the original cookbook and want it all on your iPad, this would be $10 well spent.

Bonus: Food Wishes Video Recipes

There is no app for Food Wishes unfortunately, but Chef John’s video recipes are still a great way to learn how to cook on your iPad (or computer, or phone). The best way to do this, and this has worked for me in the past, is to point your YouTube app to the Food Wishes YouTube channel, and start browsing or searching for something you want to prepare.

Food Wishes is a food blog and video blog that’s been active for almost 6 years, so chances are you’re going to find what you’re looking for. The next step is to play the video, place the iPad next to you in the kitchen, and start cooking. Be warned: it’s addictive.

Android?

Yes, yes, I know, the iPad is just one of the tablets available out there. Own an Android tablet? Here are 5 great culinary tools for making delicious meals with help from your Android device.

More?

You tell me! Do you know or use exceptional cooking apps for the iPad that I didn’t mention? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

The post Not Just Recipes: 4 iPad Apps That Teach You To Cook [iOS] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

There are plenty of services that can help you find a good restaurant. Yelp, Urbanspoon, Trip Advisor and Foursquare are just a few, and if you know what you’re looking for, chances are you’re going to find it. But have you ever had a craving for a specific dish? Say, banana pudding? Or fried rice? Have you ever visited a city and wondered where you can get the absolute best burger or the best pizza in town? The big apps are less helpful in these cases, as they don’t really go by dish, but rather by restaurant or cuisine.

A new take on food hunting called Dish.fm aims to change this, by aggregating reviews and photos from other networks, and arranging them so you can find the best dish around, rather than the best restaurant. The free iOS app currently works only in a limited number of US cities, but aims to expand to the rest of the world in the future.

Getting Started

There are several ways to get started with Dish.fm. For best experience, you should grant the app access to your current location. This is the first action you’ll have to perform upon launching the app, and it will make finding the best dish around much easier. Since I’m not in the US, I didn’t grant the app this permission, and was still able to browse the dishes and restaurants without a problem. Access to location data is not a must, but it will nag you about it every time launch the app.

You can log in to the app using Facebook or Twitter, but you can also use it effectively without doing so. If you don’t want to log in, tap “skip” in the top right.

If the app can detect your current location, and it happens to be in one of the 15 US cities currently supported, Dish.fm will present the tastiest dishes around you, complete with pictures it pulls from Instagram. Since not every dish has a photo, some will appear without one, but each dish comes with a like count, an address, distance in miles from your current location, and, of course, the name of the restaurant where it’s served.

You can use the slider on the right to adjust the suggested dishes’ distance from your current location. This can be anything from 0.1 of a mile to 15 miles, and at present you can’t switch to kilometers.

On top, you’ll find several ways to fine-tune your suggestions. To start, decide if you want to look for dishes or restaurants (yes, Dish.fm does restaurants too). I recommend going for dishes, but Dish.fm’s restaurant search is also nice as it aggregates reviews from several sources, helping you find something that’s highly rated. If you go by restaurant you’ll also see a star rating, the establishment genre or food type, and an idea about price.

Finding Yummy Dishes

And now for the really fun part of Dish.fm — the dishes! You can always look for the absolute best dishes in your area, but if you’re craving something more specific, you can filter out recommendations for a certain type of dish. Dish.fm shows the most popular searches, but you can also look for specific dishes sorted by types of cuisine and even search for specific drinks.

If you can’t find the dish you’re looking for, or want to look for dishes in a genre that doesn’t appear on the list, just start typing a keyword in the search box. The app will help you find what you’re looking for using suggestions from available dishes.

Each dish on the list is presented with a picture from Instagram, if available, a total number of likes, and other information such as distance. If you see a dish you’re interested in, find out more about it by tapping it.

On the dish’s screen, you can see how many likes and dislikes it received, its price, and comments, if any. On the left, you’ll find further details about the restaurant serving the dish such as star rating, address, phone number and hours. You can even see how many reviews the restaurant’s star rating is based on, but remember that Dish.fm relies on reviews from several different sources. From here you can also rate the dish as “Awesome” or “Awful” after you’ve tried it for yourself.

Drag the dish window up to see other dishes available in this restaurant, along with their own ratings. This is a great way to find out more about a restaurant you’re interested in. After all, you may want to eat real food before diving into that banana pudding you were craving.

Of course, nothing is complete these days unless it’s social: tap the share button to share your find on Facebook or Twitter, via email or via Messages. You can also save it to Instapaper, or print it, if you wish.

If you choose to log into the app, it will save all your Awesome and Awful ratings for you, so you can quickly find every dish you’ve rated. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to save a dish without rating it, so if you find several dishes you want to try, you’re going to have to remember them, or rate them before trying them – a Favorites section would have been useful.

Finding Where Dishes Are Served

Dish.fm doesn’t only help you find recommended dishes to try and the restaurants that serve them, it can also help you get there, or see where places are located relative to where you are now. Tapping a restaurant’s address will show its location on a map, though there are no walking directions or anything like that.

By tapping the globe icon on the top right corner of the app’s home screen, you can also get a map view of all the recommended places in your area. Set the radius to anything between 0.1 and 15 miles, and see the list of recommended places on a map. You can use several filters at once to find specific meals, or let Dish.fm just show the best overall dishes in the area if you can’t decide what you want to have.

Bottom Line

As a foodie, I love the idea behind searching for dishes instead of restaurants. When travelling, I often want to know about the best pizza in town, or the absolute best place to have ice cream. With Dish.fm, the task becomes much easier, and with ratings being aggregated from several sources, I feel that the data I’m getting is pretty accurate.

I do wish the app expanded its range to work outside the US, and definitely want to see it on other platforms such as Android. I’m told we can expect both these features later this year, though for the time being Dish.fm is off to a really good start. I’d recommend it in a heartbeat to anyone who likes finding the best places to eat.

Download: Dish.fm at the App Store

Looking for other food-oriented apps that’ll help you find the best pizza in town? This cool infographic shows the top 35 restaurant-hunting apps, and what each is best for. Check it out!

How do you find places to eat when abroad? Do you use apps to find restaurants, or are there better ways? Tell us in the comments.

The post What Is The Best Pizza In Town? Dish.fm Will Find It For You [iOS] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

There is also something to be said, however, for a professional “recipe book” approach, where content comes from a single trusted source that’s accountable for each recipe. That’s what you get with Must-Have Recipes, an Android app by Better Homes and Gardens featuring a professionally curated collection of recipes with a gorgeous studio-quality image of each recipe. It is not perfect (there are a couple of glaring drawbacks which I’ll discuss below), but it is exceptionally good, both in terms of content and look-and-feel.

Browsing And Filtering Recipes

The app feels modern and angular, with an independently-scrolling sidebar flanking the main content area:

The sidebar makes it easy to focus on specific categories, such as Beverages or Grilling recipes:

Each category offers its own set of custom filters, to narrow down the selection even more:

You can only select one filtering category at a time: You can’t select both Beef and Lamb at the same time, for example. That section should really have radio buttons rather than checkboxes.

Often, just the filter is going to narrow down selection sufficiently so that you don’t have to search. The filter above yields just a single result with the default collection of 500 recipes:

If you’re happy with whatever the filter came up with, you can continue to the individual recipe. But if you’re looking for a bit more granularity, you should take a look at the search feature.

Searching For Recipes

To use the search feature, you have to swipe right, reveling an extra sidebar:

We’ll get to the Shopping List in a moment, but first, let’s look at the Search screen:

You can search for a term, and you can also filter your results:

The filter is AND-based, so marking two categories as shown above makes it very picky, and you may not get any results at all. The search is nice, but it’s a far cry from a dedicated recipe search engine like Yummly.

Once you find a recipe that looks interesting, it’s time to dig into the instructions and see what it takes.

Individual Recipe Display

Each recipe starts with a compelling photo:

Scroll down, and the list of ingredient fills the screen:

Note that some of the ingredients look like links: Olive oil, cloves of garlic, and fresh thyme in our case. Tapping each of these leads to a related cooking tip. For example, when I tap “fresh thyme” I get this:

The Steps tab is pretty much what you’d expect, with a concise description for each step and a clear display. The four icons at the bottom of the screen let you start a timer, add the recipe to your shopping list or your favorites, and share the recipe.

The Shopping List

The shopping list is one of the best parts of Must-Have Recipes. When adding a recipe to your shopping list, the app first lets you go over the ingredients so you can omit any ingredients you already have on hand:

Once it’s time to shop for groceries, you can whip out your phone and switch over to the shopping list display:

The list is broken up by aisles, and you can see which ingredient goes with which recipe. If you decide to skip a given recipe after all, you can tap the bottom-left “bowl” icon and remove the recipe from the list.

Business Model

Must-Have recipes has almost no banners (it does have one, but you can switch it off). It offers a very clean experience: You just get your recipes, and gorgeous images. It comes with a generous collection of 500 recipes – more than enough to judge the format’s quality and style. The assumption is simple: Once you’ve come to trust the app as a source of recipe ideas, you will probably want more. And Must-Have Recipes will gladly deliver… for a fee:

For a buck (or 3.70 ILS, in my case), you can buy a collection of a hundred recipes around a specific theme. You can think of it as a recipe booklet custom-made for the app, basically. Collections range from 30-Minute Dinners to baking to healthy cooking, and more. I like this model, because you get to have a very clean experience even if you don’t buy anything. As long as you’re happy with the 500 recipes included with the app, you don’t have to spend a dime to enjoy all of its features. And when you do want to expand your repertoire, a buck is a reasonable price for a collection of a hundred tested recipes from a trusted source.  This is a different model from the one these four recipe apps for Android use, and not everyone is going to like it – but I do.

Disadvantages And Annoyances

For all of its visual appeal and polish, Must-Have Recipes has two glaring drawbacks which kept me from becoming a paying customer:

• You can’t modify quantities: Basically, if a recipe makes four servings, that’s that. You can’t tell the app you actually want to make six or eight servings. This also means the shopping list is only useful if you want to make the original quantities.
• You can’t convert measurements: If you’re in the US, Must-Have Recipes is great. But if you’re used to the metric system, you’re out of luck. This would have been very easy for Better Homes and Gardens to add, and mainly requires some awareness of the fact that there are people outside of the US, too.

Another disadvantage, although not a serious one, is the lack of comments and ratings. It’s nice that the recipes come from a trusted source, but I’d still like to know what other users think about each recipe. Not offering this feature feels like a bit of an insecure move on the developer’s part: Is Better Homes and Gardens afraid to let their readers be heard?

Final Thoughts

Despite its two cons, I find Must-Have Recipes a joy to use. The app is well laid out, and it’s snappy and responsive on my device. There is something to be said for recipes from a trusted kitchen, and the beautiful photos don’t hurt, either. I find the business model compelling and fair, and could really see myself using the app on a regular basis if the developer ever adds flexible quantities and metric conversions. And who knows, fixing these flaws may even net it a spot on our list of Best Android Apps.

What about yourself? Are you more into crowd-sourced recipes, or is the trusted-kitchen approach better for you? I’d love to know what recipe apps you use – let me know below.

The post Discover Exciting New Dishes And Effortlessly Create Shopping Lists With Must-Have Recipes [Android] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Yummly launched back in 2010 and is currently one of the fastest-growing food sites on the net. Their main aim is to bring in recipes from all over the web, making the recipes easy for you to search and find your favorites. Now that they’ve added their new social features, they are well and truly ready to become the Pinterest of the food world. Now is the time for you to test out the upgrade and see for yourself!

Yummly’s Re-Vamp

Yummly has always been very useful as a search engine and easy on the eyes, however the recent overhaul has made it look fabulous. The recipes are bright and appealing, and each recipe is shown with images of similar recipes alongside it. So if another one catches your eye, you can jump directly to that recipe instead.

As well as bigger photos, Yummly has added new recipe sources, improved the search functions so that it’s smoother and faster, and added taste profiles to give better recommendations to you. The rating of each recipe is now more accurate, incorporating Yummly user ratings and other social feedback alongside the reputation of the source site generally.

Yummly Search

Yummly have made recipe search as easy as possible, ensuring all food requirements are taken into consideration. It doesn’t matter if you’re vegetarian, gluten intolerant, hate spinach or just trying to cut back on calories; Yummly lets you filter your results to find just what you’re after. As well as foods you love or hate, you can also filter by holiday celebrations, cuisine, diet, courses, the source site of the recipe, cooking techniques, tastes (e.g. salty, bitter, sweet), nutrition, brands of ingredients or how recently the recipe was added.

When you’re viewing the recipe, you can see the full list of ingredients, links to the original recipe, nutritional information, taste ratings, tags and more. It’s very easy to see if this is something you’re going to enjoy and whether you have all the ingredients on hand.

Social Sharing On Yummly

It’s really easy to share and keep track of the recipes you love using Yummly. Log into Yummly using Facebook or Google credentials and you are ready to go. Logging in will also allow you to save your diet and allergy preferences, plus a few links to social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. You can also choose in settings whether to share your Yummly activities with Facebook or not.

If you have chosen to share your activities with Facebook, share your favorite recipes with Facebook by simply clicking “Yum” on anything you like. Yummly will also keep track of all your “Yum’s” for later. You can also comment on recipes and share those comments with Facebook. Regular social sharing buttons are there too, so you can quickly Tweet, Like, Pin, Stumble or email the recipe.

The “Yum’s” also act as a popularity indicator for the recipe. You can quickly see that a recipe with over 200 “Yum’s” is worth checking out in more detail.

Yummly Remembers What You Like

As long as you are logged in, Yummly can filter every search you do according to your taste preferences, which you can save in your settings. These settings are also easy to override if you change your mind and want to look for something else.

Need More Recipes?

Let’s face it, all cooks need more recipes. The fact that the internet has many great recipe websites doesn’t mean we’re ever going to stick with just one. You can also get your daily dose of food porn from: Epicurious; Foodily; Punchfork; Gojee; great YouTube cooking channels; sites that inspire you to start baking; a number of great vegetarian recipe sites; some old favorite recipe sites; recipe sites with tasty visuals; great sites for holiday recipes.

What do you think of Yummly’s new social features? Will you be sharing your favorite recipes on Facebook?

The post Yummly Lets You Share Recipes Just By Saying “Yum” appeared first on MakeUseOf.

What else do you need other than the recipe? Well, recipe unit converters and timers. How many times have you found the perfect recipe online only to realise you have no kitchen scales and no idea just how much flour you need for 50 grams? Or how many mL water is in a cup? With people worldwide using such different measurements, you’re bound to come across it on occasion. Here are the best cooking apps to have on your Android, ready for your kitchen.

Kitchen Timer

Most people have at least one timer in their kitchen. But what do you use when you’ve got a few different things that need to be timed all at once? Kitchen Timer is an application that will let you set three different timers at different times. If you regularly need a certain time set, you can save a length of time as a preset. The alarm itself is controlled by Android, so ensure the phone isn’t on silent. The timer screen is clear and self-explanatory, so it’s easy to view from a distance and keep track of things. If you switch to another application while the timer is counting down, it will still alert you with the alarm sound and a pop-up.

Recipe Convert

So, you need to know what 250 ml is as US fluid ounces? Or you need to know that AND double the recipe. No problem – the Recipe Convert cooking app will do all that for you. Basically, whatever conversions you need to make this app will make them for you. It will even convert to and from decimal values to fractions, so if you prefer to write 1/3 Litre it will let you do this instead of forcing you to write 333.33 mL. Essentially this app will let you take the amounts you see in your recipe and convert them to values you can use with the tools in your kitchen. It’s easy to use and incredibly handy for any cook.

Egg Timer

Cooking the perfect egg will never be a problem again using this handy Egg Timer app. It lets you enter in the exact way you like to eat your eggs, the starting temperature of the egg, the size of the egg and even your altitude, which you can calculate with your GPS. Egg sizes can be measured in EU classes, US classes or RU classes, and all units can be adjusted to your liking. The timer assumes that you will put the egg into boiling water at the same time as you start the timer, then keep the egg submerged in boiling water until the timer goes off. Perfect eggs – who could want more?

Big Oven

All good recipe apps need to have great pictures, else most people would never even notice the best recipes. Big Oven delivers on this front, offering some fantastic droolworthy pictures to make you ready to cook EVERYTHING. It also helps you to write your grocery list so that you know you have all that you need. The recipes are nice and clear and comments are accessible if you want to tweak it with suggestions. The app also rotates with your phone or tablet, which is good if you’ve got your Android device on a stand and you’re trying to read the instructions.

Recipe Search

Recipe Search is a cooking app by AllTheCooks.com which is a gorgeous way to browse recipes and cook. In fact, all the important things are present in this recipe app: browsing feature; search feature; rotation; grocery list; bookmarking favourites; comments; photos; and much more.

More Food Apps For Android

There are plenty more great food-related apps we’ve previously featured on MakeUseOf. If you’re keen to read more, check out: Evernote Food; Epicurious; ChefTap; 4 great recipe apps; and 5 great restaurant apps.

What’s your favourite app to help you cook? Which recipe apps do you use?

The post The Tablet Gourmand: 5 Great Cook’s Tools For Making Delicious Meals [Android] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

If you want to learn to make sushi, of course, you will need to practice a bit, but the iOS app called Teach Me Sushi will help you take a step in the right direction. It comes with videos, guides, and basic information that will help you get started and turn you into a sushi making pro. Imagine the surprised look on your friends faces when you invite them over for sushi and it ends up being sushi home-made by you. Teach Me Sushi can help make this happen.

Best of all, you can grab Teach Me Sushi from the App Store free for a limited time. If you want to become a sushi master without spending the $4.99 that the app normally costs, you need to download this app quickly.

Using The App

The main screen of the app features all of tutorials and videos for the app. The first one you are going to want to click is “Introduction.” This will take you to a video that shows you the basics of making sushi. If you don’t have any experience, this is the place to start.

The main screen also has videos for preparing your equipment, choosing the fish, cooking the rice, and preparing the vegetables. If you want to get the most out of the app, you should really watch each of these videos, as they will be quite useful as you go forward with making your delicious sushi.

Below the introduction videos are the actual recipes, but we will get to those later. First, you will want to check out the ingredients option on the menu on the bottom of the screen. From here, you will enter how many people you are going to make sushi for, and then you will choose the type of sushi you are making. Once you make these selections, the app will give you a shopping list for exactly what you need to make the sushi you want. The app will even show you where you can buy the recommended ingredients in your area.

The next section of the app will tell you what kind of equipment you need. If you’re an experienced sushi maker, this information is probably elementary, but for people new to the process, knowing what kind of equipment you will need is important. Just like with the ingredients, the app can tell you where there is a store to buy the important equipment.

The app also comes with a rice timer, that will guide you through the process of making rice for your sushi. All you need to do is follow the instructions and click the “Start Timer” button from within the app. If you do what the app says, your rice should come out perfect, and be ready for your sushi.

Earlier I mentioned recipes, and now that you have all the equipment you need, you can go back and check them out. Each of the recipes in the app comes with a video that will show you exactly how to make it. If you prefer to see it in written form, the app has a step by step option that you can follow as you make the sushi. There is also a section called About This Sushi section that will give you a little more information about that particular item.

The app comes with eight recipes out of the box, and you can purchase more via in-app purchase. Each one costs $0.99, so if you want to make a wider variety of sushi, you can take advantage of this section of the app. Of course, you can use the built-in options and never spend another dime, but it’s nice to have the option to expand the app if you should so choose.

Conclusion

If you are looking to become a master of preparing sushi, look no further than Teach Me Sushi. It’s incredibly simple to use, and as long as you follow its directions, you will be ready to start serving delicious sushi to your friends in no time. Don’t wait though, because you can only grab the app free from the App Store for a limited time.

The post Teach Me Sushi – The Easiest Way To Become A Sushi Master [iOS, Free For A Limited Time] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Then, feeling inspired, we watched Food, Inc. Finally, just about ready to chuck every piece of animal product in our house, we decided to watch yet another documentary called Vegucated – a fun documentary where the filmmaker took three people off the street and introduced them to a Vegan lifestyle cold-turkey (pun intended). All three adopted the lifestyle for good. Every person saw crazy health benefits from just a few months on the diet – lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, lower weight, and the list went on.

Personally, I’ve never really been the “vegetarian” type. That stuff is for tree-hugging hippies, right? I grew up hunting and fishing, so it would be pretty hypocritical of me to start screaming “save the animals” at this point in my life. However, the whole health-issue really struck a nerve with me. I’ve been trying to lose a bit of weight lately, and noticed that it seemed no matter what I did, I couldn’t achieve my goals. Maybe it’s part reduced metabolism from getting older, but seriously, it can’t be that bad?

Hearing about The China Study and watching those documentaries woke our family up to the reality that what companies put in processed foods actually trick your stomach into getting hungry again more quickly after eating. Ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup are in everything. Piled on top of the high-caloric, high-fat meat products that make up 60 to 70 percent of every meal – it’s no wonder losing weight and getting healthy is so hard.

Vegetarian Recipes to Avoid Food Boredom

As I usually do when I start researching anything, I turned to MakeUseOf and discovered a couple of cool vegetarian articles, like Bakari’s article listing some online resources to help with becoming vegetarian. We’ve also covered VegetarianRecipe.us, a vegetarian recipe search engine, and a great place to go to find veggie recipes.

However, being totally new to this, I knew that I couldn’t just jump in without having a really wide range of good-tasting recipes to choose from. I need everything from breakfast, dinner and as many snacks as possible so that I can avoid getting hungry on a diet of what I thought would be an endless chain of salad after salad.

Little did I know that there’s a virtual smorgasbord of foods when it comes to vegetables, grains, beans and nuts. I really wish I’d explored these websites before, and I’m pleased to offer them as a resource to anyone else out there that might be getting started in this strange new world called vegetarianism (or veganism…if that’s your flavor).

 7 Awesome Vegetarian Recipe Websites

In order to keep this article apart from the many recipe websites that we’ve covered here at MUO, I’m going to keep this review focused only on sites that are focused entirely on vegetarian fare, not those that only offer a vegetarian category.

Under that criteria, it’s pretty obvious which is the biggest, best site out there for vegetarian recipes, and that’s the Vegetarian Times. Between the well-designed front page of the site that offers lots of big photos of food that looks too tasty to be vegetarian, and a collection of blog entries that can keep you motivated about your new lifestyle, this is a fun site to check out every day even if you’re not looking for a recipe.

Of course, if you are wondering how on earth you’re going to turn those vegetables in your refrigerator into an interesting meal that your family will actually want to eat, the Recipes menu item is the place to turn to. All recipes are organized by category or cuisine, and there are often special collections of recipes for things like holidays.

Best of all, each recipe shows a large, detailed photo of what the dish is supposed to look like, and detailed ingredients and instructions on how to whip it together yourself.

Best of all, nutritional information per recipe! It’s actually pretty rare to find that on recipe sites, and it’s nice especially if you’re keeping track of things like calories, fat content, or sodium intake.

Another nice one that I’ve found I visit most often is a site called VegWeb. The site has a community and a blog, but by far its core purpose is to serve as a place to go for great vegetarian recipes. What I like about it is that you can go to the main page, glance at the pictures and categories, and just click on what you feel like eating tonight.

Each section has tons of recipes to choose from, and they really aren’t that hard to make. They are community entered recipes, so most may not have photos, but I’ve come across some really awesome recipes here that made me realize removing meat from my diet really isn’t going to be all that painful after all.

Another site that is similarly a good place to go if you’re really unsure of what type of food you want to eat is VegKitchen. The Recipes Galore area gives you interesting categories to check out like slow-cooker recipes, southwestern supper, or soulful soups. You can even choose to search for vegan or vegetarian recipes by what sort of special occasion you have going on, which is kind of a cool way to look for ideas.

This is another site where the recipe layout is very professional. The rating system is always helpful to sort of weed out the really gross recipes, and the pictures give you a quick sense of what the end result will be. A lot of times you can decide whether or not you want to make it based on the picture alone.

Another great recipe site dedicated to the veggie lifestyle is ChooseVeg. Big positive points for the useful front panel menu that lets you go directly into the recipe areas for the type of meal you’re looking to eat. Extra bonus points for including a snack category – critical if you’re hoping to stave off hunger with low-cal snacks and lose weight.

One negative point is the fact that the recipes don’t feature any pictures, but that is countered by the fact that most of the articles are easy to make and taste good. That’s actually a very difficult combination to find, and most of the articles at ChooseVeg are like that, which makes it a place where I go to often for ideas.

I should add that there is an area of videos that show how to make particular feature recipes, so I can’t say the site is lacking in all multimedia. Check out a couple of these videos – they’re actually very professionally done.

One unlikely place to find vegetarian recipes where you probably wouldn’t otherwise look, is the Compassionate Overkilling website. It’s clearly an activist website with articles and investigations into animal cruelty around the world.  But click on the “Veg Recipes” menu item and there you go – tons of some of the best recipes I’ve ever seen that offer non-meat alternatives for the kind of meals that meat-lovers have a hard time giving up.

I think my favorite is Sloppy Moes. If you use the right brand of vegetable protein meat substitute, it’s unbelievably close to the original. There aren’t volumes of recipes here, but the recipes at Compassionate Overkilling are the ones you would turn to when you’re having a really strong meat-craving and are on the edge of giving up the non-meat lifestyle.

The last veg-focused site I wanted to mention is Herbivoracious. Why do I mention this site? Well, one reason is that I was able to find a recipe here for “making tofu delicious”. Tofu is one of those foods that I always wanted to like because it’s such a great source of protein, but it’s so horribly bland that it’s really hard to figure out what to do with it. Well, Herbivoracious – much more of a recipe “blog” than a recipe “site” – has those sorts of solutions available.

It’s also a fun place to go just to read some articles. It’s a typical blog, written by authors with that usual ‘bloggy’, conversational wit and sarcasm that blogs are well-known for (yes, we’re guilty of it too), but that’s what makes it a fun place to visit every day and check out what new ideas the authors have come up with.

So, that completes my list of top vegetarian-focused sites, but that only makes six, right? Well, I’m going to break the rules with one case and mention AllRecipes. It isn’t only focused on vegetarian, and it has been my all-time favorite site for meal ideas for many years, whether I was vegetarian, meat-eating, low-carb, low-fat or whatever.

The reason it’s so ideal for vegetarians too is that it offers a really useful and effective ingredient search that lets you type in up to three ingredients that you might have laying around the house, and it’ll list all of the recipe ideas that incorporate those ingredients.  I tried it with something as unlikely as “black beans”, “kale” and “vegetable broth”, and the site gave me the recipe for a 5-star vegetable-broth based bean soup that I’m going to try out for lunch this weekend.

One thing I have to say about heading down this new and interesting lifestyle path is that it’s nearly impossible to keep up without an arsenal of really tasty recipes you can choose from when you’re looking for what to have for dinner with your family. These are the sort of recipes that you’ll start to really crave once you have them once or twice. They’ll give you a place to go rather than opting for the heart-killing meat-based meals people are so focused on these days.

Are you a long-time vegetarian or vegan with your own list of awesome recipe sites? Are you a newb like me, looking for as many tasty ideas as possible? Share your own experience with this lifestyle and let us know where you turn to on the Internet for meal ideas in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Quinoa Salad Via Shutterstock

The post 7 Vegetarian Recipe Sites For The Struggling Former Meat Eater appeared first on MakeUseOf.

The new features are available on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. There is also a redesigned interface to accommodate the new features. The first new feature is called Explore Recipes, which lets you get ideas from websites all over the Internet. You can use this feature to browse through recipes or use the search feature to find specific types of foods if you have something in mind.

The next part of the app is called My Cookbook. This is where every recipe you clip will end up. You can also clip recipes using Evernote Web Clipper, which will allow you to view them in the Evernote Food application. You can also type your own recipes in Evernote, and the app will automatically detect them and add them to My cookbook.

A big new feature of the app is the implementation of restaurants. You can use this feature to discover new restaurants, add them to your list, and then track where you’ve been. If you don’t want to make food yourself, then this is the section of the app you will love.

The final new section is called My Meals. This is where you can store all of your favorite finished products. It’s akin to Instagram, in that you can take all kinds of pictures of the food, but it comes with a good amount of Evernote style.

For Evernote Food users, this update should be quite useful. It has all the features a foodie and Evernote user needs.

Source: Evernote

The post Evernote Food Adds Awesome New Features And Full iPad Support [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Below are four baking websites that offer several recipes, cooking tips, and more for those of you who absolutely love baking. As someone who is a terrible cook, I can’t exactly say I’ve tried the recipes out myself. However, as someone who loves to eat baked food, I can definitely say that the majority of these items sound great. So grab your flour, rolling pin, and vanilla extract (and everything else that has to do with baking). It’s time to get started.

Bakerella

Bakerella is the first baking website on our list, and it has quite the selection of delicious treats and baked goods. The website has a little bit of something for every occasion whether it be breakfast, parties, or dessert. It’s a visually-appealing site with equally visually-appealing delights, and the website’s detailed imagery will definitely leave you hungry.

Fortunately, the recipes on the site should help satiate your hunger, so don’t think those pictures are simply there to tease you. With items like Chocolate-covered Cheesecake Bars and Red Velvet Cake Balls, you’ll be looking for any school fundraiser you can possibly help out just to get rid of all the baked goods in your kitchen.

Bake Or Break

Bake Or Break is the blog of a woman from the Southern United States now living in New York City, and after her arrival to the Northeast, she decided to bring the taste of the American South to the rest of the world. Her blog was originally devoted to the recipes of others, but it is now home to her own creations. Here, you’ll mainly find original concoctions, and judging by the photographs on the site, they look amazing.

As a blog, you’ll get more of a personal feel with this website, and when it comes to baked food, I think that’s a good thing.

Cake Wrecks

For those of you are wondering how not to bake, Cake Wrecks is the website to go to. The website displays photos of cakes by professional bakeries that can only be described in one word: disaster. That said, if you have discovered that baking is not your talent, this is a great site to make yourself feel better!

Regardless of whether your are a baking fanatic or not, this is a great site to go to if you’re wanting a few laughs. Imagining the faces of the recipients of these cakes makes it all worth it…

BakeSpace

BakeSpace (which happens to have a very similar name to an older, not-so-visited social network) is a website that focuses on sharing recipes between baking enthusiasts. The website – part forum and part collaborative blog – pulls recipes from its users and its staff and posts them publicly for people to see.

It’s a great website for getting new ideas for your kitchen experiments, and I believe I’ll find myself browsing it often. Granted, I’m of no use in the kitchen, so I suppose I will have to sweet-talk my girlfriend just a little.

Conclusion

That’s all of the baked goods we have for you today, MakeUseOf. Hopefully, you’ll find a few recipes to try out on your own!

What other websites do you use for cooking ideas? Do you have any pictures of your own baked goods?

Image Credit: Miyabi

The post 4 Fantastic Mouthwatering Websites That Will Motivate You Into Starting Baking appeared first on MakeUseOf.

I will say this now, these aren’t the only ones, as MakeUseOf and the Internet in general are chock-full of websites of all types, but after some research and great results I’ve narrowed down the list to what I think are the best websites in various categories of what we do almost every day.

Checking The Weather

Have you ever got up in the morning, got ready, ate breakfast, walked out to your car and realized there was frost on every window? Now instead of being on the road, you have to take five or ten minutes to scrape your windows. This just happened to me recently. Of course there are lots of different weather scenarios, but this one seemed quite fitting given the time of year here in the Midwestern United States.

How could you avoid this or any other weather-related problem? By simply checking the weather the night before. However, in my experience I’ve found that many meteorology websites aren’t as accurate as they should be. Weather Underground is one you can trust and has all the information that you need about the weather. One feature I love about Weather Underground, which Justin actually focused an entire article on, is FullScreenWeather.

Read about Weather Underground in more depth on MakeUseOf:

• FullScreenWeather- Cool Online Weather Service From Wunderground
• Weather Underground – The Best Weather Site On The Web
• Wunderground Road Trip Maps The Weather Throughout Your Route [US Only]

Check out more helpful weather articles.

Managing Your Money

Have you jumped on board with online banking and e-statements? If not, you should as it has many benefits. But alongside your native online banking interface is another very useful website and tool that can bring even more value to your online banking experience. That website is Mint.com. You’ve likely heard of it, it’s no secret anymore. However, I would be doing you an disservice if I were to leave it out of this article.

It is clearly the best financing tool available to you for managing your budgets, goals, trends, investments, as well as alerting you about the different statuses of your accounts. Think of it as your personal finance manager that doesn’t cost you a thing.

Read more about Mint.com and finance on MakeUseOf.

Navigating Your Way Around

Getting lost is never fun when you have somewhere to be. Many times the difference can simply be having a better understanding of what the area looks like or just having a printout of directions. There are a couple sites that are very beneficial and those are MapQuest and OpenStreetMap.

Now I know what you’re thinking, “MapQuest? Really? Not Google Maps?” And my response is “Yes, really.” Recently I have gone back to using MapQuest more and have found that it has quite a few excellent features. The interface is intuitive and it shouldn’t be ignored. One feature I really like is its integration with other places that you are looking for such as lodging, food, entertainment, etc. You also can give it information about your driving which it will use in helping you find the most efficient route. I encourage you to try it. You might just like it better.

OpenStreetMap is a user-based, wiki world map. That means all of the data is free, downloadable and completely user-generated. It’s surprisingly useful, despite its simple concept.

Read more about navigation on MakeUseOf.

Contacting Companies Over The Phone

Ugh. The dreaded phone customer service. Granted, some companies are better than others, but most of the time it is a time-consuming process that usually gets us all flustered before we even talk to a representative. There are a couple websites that have acknowledged this issue and are working to make the consumers’ experience with customer service much better. You may have already heard of them: LucyPhone and GetHuman.

GetHuman takes customer service a step further. The phone number provided is ranked by users and displays information such as the average wait time. I’m also very impressed by two additional features that GetHuman offers. They’ve teamed up with LucyPhone and integrated their “Let Us Call You” technology directly into the GetHuman website allowing you to have the company call you with a click of the button. Or if you prefer to make the call, you can save your minutes with the option to call right from their website.

Cooking Or Searching For Food

I’m not much of a chef (that’s an understatement), so when I need directions on how to prepare a meal, big or small, I’ve found AllRecipes to be the solution. With visuals, reviews and easy-to-follow directions (a must for me) AllRecipes is without a doubt my favorite go-to websites for recipes.

Steep.it is another awesome, but very simple website. If you are a tea drinker, this is the site for you. It was created by the developer who created the e.ggtimer and is based on the same principles.

Have you ever been craving something, but didn’t know where to find it? There are lots of websites to help you find specific restaurants, but what if you wanted to indulge into some tacos, but didn’t know where to find some? Foodspotting has you covered.

Read more about recipe websites and cooking on MakeUseOf.

Shopping Online

Shopping online versus going to the store has many advantages. One being that the majority of the time, prices are cheaper. But wouldn’t you like to find an even cheaper price? RetailMeNot is a website that has a coupon code for just about every website that you can purchase from. I’ve found several codes on there that have dropped the price of my shopping cart. It’s certainly worth a look.

Now that you’ve saved loads of money on your purchase, how about finding out when it will arrive. There are many tracking websites out there, but one that I like above all the rest is Packagetrackr.

Staying (Or Getting) Healthy & Fit

To get and stay healthy and fit it takes a couple things. First it takes purpose and there are websites to help you stay purposed and dedicated. Next it takes knowledge, which there are also websites to help you with. LoseIt is a website which, like its name implies, helps you lose or maintain your weight.

What about keeping track of your workouts though? Although LoseIt can do this, another great website focused on the social aspect of working out and recording your achievements is Fitocracy.

Next there are two websites for learning more about your health: WebMD and RealAge. Both of these websites are packed full of useful information to help you make the best choices for your health. Although these websites in know way replace a doctor, they can be a nice asset in helping you determine the next step in your health.

Read more about fitness and health on MakeUseOf.

Quickly Discovering Information

Google right? No. Google is great yes, and for most people it suffices. But let’s forget there’s a Google for a second. There are a lot of other great sources for information as well. There’s one website that has really surprised me and I think it’s great. It’s called QwickUp and is basically a place where you can look at information from several different sources all in one place.

Not only can you look at several sources, but you can pick and choose which ones you want. There’s no creating an account, but simply click the “gear” button to adjust which websites you’d like to see displayed.

Check Time Zones All Over The World

You may not need to check time zones every day, or every week, but whenever you do need to, there are two nice tools. The first is quite simple and is from the same developer of the website Steep.it, which I mentioned earlier. The site is called What Time Is It There. It’s for the US only, but it’s quite simple.

The next website is TimeZoneCheck. It is worldwide and is a bit more interactive than What Time Is It There.

Read more about time zone tools on MakeUseOf.

Research For Movie Times, Reviews & Locations

Researching movies can be fun, but it can also be a pain. However, whenever you have a website that combines the trailer, reviews, locations and movie times all in one, it makes deciding on a movie much easier, especially when there’s several people trying to pick which one to go see. Fandango does just that.

Check out more ways to find information on movies on MakeUseOf.

Finding Your Time Of Zen

Ahh we’re finally relaxing. There are some websites to help you do this too. Have you ever tried to just sit there, doing nothing, for two minutes? Sounds easy. But when you have a computer in front of you, a cell phone vibrating beside you and who knows what other electronic devices surrounding you, it can be quite difficult. We have become a society of “Go! Go! Go!” Why? Why not take some time just to think.

DoNothingFor2Minutes.com and Calm.com help you to do just that. DoNothingFor2Minutes.com starts right as the page is loaded. Don’t touch your mouse or keyboard for two minutes. And while you do this, try not to use any other electronic device either. Just sit there and listen to the soothing sounds.

Calm.com is a little more detailed. If you move your mouse, it won’t tell you you failed, but it gives you a few more options as well.

RainyMood is another that you have actually probably heard of. It’s quite popular, but it is another simple website of none other than, rain sounds. It also features a different music video each day that goes alone with the sound of rain and storms.

Go To Bed

One last website is Sleepyti.me, where you enter the time you want to wake up and it tells you the times you should go to sleep. It is based on sleep cycles. I’m not sure how valid the information is, but it seems rather accurate and I would guess that it has some validity to it.

Conclusion

Again, these are not the only websites of their kind. The Internet has lots of informative websites to help you – these are just some of the ones I feel can be a help on a daily basis. Also, I will note that many of these also have a smartphone app too, so if you do have a smartphone, be sure to look into that.

Do you have any recommendations for useful sites for your daily tasks? Perhaps one that I overlooked? Share them below in the comments!

Image Credit: Business Woman Multitasking via Shutterstock

The post Some Useful Websites To Aid You In Your Daily Routine appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Using food consumed on the street as a vehicle, the series explores the link between ancient traditions and modern convenience as well as other factors that shape cuisine. Some of the dishes might not be to everyone’s taste, but there’s no denying that the stories that accompany each trip make for fascinating and unique tales.

Each episode is split into two films of ten minutes each, and I’ve hand-picked some of the most interesting below.

Beijing

The history surrounding China’s capital, its people and of course food is undeniably intriguing. Due to a crackdown on street food vendors in the city in a bid to clean up the streets, much of the traditional food has been pushed into specific areas, and much of it is embraced by tourists.

The series examines some of the more popular dishes as well as traditional Chinese food, like the “Chinese hamburger” and businesses that have survived for seven generations for more than 230 years.

Montreal

The second-largest French-speaking city in the world outside of Paris, Montreal sees a very unique fusion of French and English in both language, culture and food. This has led to divisions in politics, and of course the culinary habits of its 1.6 million inhabitants.

French food is known the world over for its subtle flavours and attention to detail, and Montreal continues this tradition in North America. This episode looks at the often controversial topics of fast food and fine dining in a bilingual city of young and old.

Osaka

In Japan, Osaka is known as the nation’s kitchen and was allegedly the first city in Japan where the restaurants had counters. It is the second-largest city in the country, and has a reputation being impatient – both in day-to-day life and when it comes to food.

With an emphasis on seafood, equality and speed, Osaka is a city that truly embraces street food – from the after-dark markets serving local favourites to Korea-town where necessities of the past have carved a way for delicacies of the present.

London

One of the most multicultural cities in the world, London is home to many different cultures, languages and the dishes that accompany such diversity. In a country where curry is the national dish, London serves up some of the best street food in the world.

The river Thames makes an important contribution to the local street food, with the eels, cockles and whelks featuring on menus from vendors throughout the city.

Cairo

Known by locals as a city without a manual, Cairo has a rich history of economic power, iconic architecture and a unique menu of street food. International food chains exist in Cairo, though for many they are too expensive and thus street food is elevated to another level of importance.

This episode of Street Food pays greater attention to the troubles faced by people in the years leading up to what many have dubbed the “Arab Spring” in 2011. While the political situation has changed since this series was produced, the flavours and traditions have survived thousands of years and will surely go on for generations to come.

Lima

The Peruvian capital is home to 9 million people and is famous for its food, especially within South America. The diverse mix of flavours has given way to a culture of willingness to try new things, which sits alongside recipes that date back to Incan times.

The culture now embraces traditional Andean food which in the past has been unavailable for political (and geographical) reasons. These traditions are now being re-imagined under the guise of “new Andean cuisine” which fuses tradition and modern creativity into one dish.

The Rest

There are another seven cities in the series of thirteen, each with their own two part films which you can watch via the links below:

• Fez [Part One] [Part Two]
• Jerusalem [Part One] [Part Two]
• Kingston [Part One] [Part Two]
• Nairobi [Part One] [Part Two]
• New York [Part One] [Part Two]
• Palermo [Part One] [Part Two]
• Zanzibar [Part One] [Part Two]

Don’t forget to add any comments and thoughts regarding the series, food discussed or any of your other favourite Al Jazeera series in the comments, below.

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