I did decide I would enjoy a kindle and in particular a kindle fire. It amused me that it had a touch screen as I remember watching Star Trek with my grandfather and thinking that touch screens would never happen! With my kindle fire I was able to enter the world of apps and I wasn’t that impressed until I came across pepperplate.com.
Pepperplate.com is a website and also an app that takes your recipes (sometimes even importing them automatically from popular recipe websites like allrecipes.com or even Pioneer Woman) and from them can help you generate menus and shopping lists. I’ve found the website works best for importing recipes, but I love the app for using my kindle fire to cook! You can bring up a recipe on the app and press the “cook now” button and the screen stays lit the whole time you are cooking. There are even timers in the app to help you time your mixing, or even your baking.
Before I stared using pepperplate.com I had paper clutter. I would see a recipe I wanted to try and while I tried not to waste paper I would frequently print it out. I like shiny new recipes on the screen, but I never get around to trying them all so the result was piles of paper that I would later have to sort through.
I also would routinely leave out an ingredient that I would need for a recipe or forget something that I had on my menu and therefore forget to purchase ingredients. It’s a job hazard of being a mom to small child who likes lots of attention! Now with pepperplate.com I can even take a digital grocery list to the store with me if I would like, but I can certainly scroll through the generated shopping list to make sure I don’t leave anything out. Shopping with the app isn’t my favorite option because it doesn’t stay lit and my daughter is always wanting to grab my kindle, but it is handy to have someone look through my recipes and make out a shopping list for me!
Another perk is that it makes my Menu Plan Monday posts a breeze! That would be a hard blog post to write with all those links to recipes, but pepperplate.com keeps them all organized and I can access them with a click of a button!
It’s a free app, so if you are looking to simplify your life (if you don’t have to have a smart phone or tablet–you can use the website!) just click over and give it a try. Let me know what you think!