Be ‘Appy In Your Kitchen

Be ‘Appy In Your Kitchen

In previous blogs, we talked about integrating technology into the kitchen.  This week we are looking at the best apps for your Smartphone or tablet to make life easier in the kitchen.

Cooking up a storm

As you might expect, the most common apps you’ll come across for the kitchen are cooking and recipe apps and there are literally thousands out there. Which one suit you best will depend on your level of skill and the type of food you like.

For example, if you have a favourite chef or cookbook, it might be worth checking whether or not there’s a corresponding app. Two good examples are Jamie’s 20 Minute Meals and Mario Batali Cooks. Be aware, however, that most celebrity chef apps aren’t free. A good free option is Whole Foods Market Recipes for Apple devices or, Epicurious for Android. The latter comes with some 28,000 recipes, mostly sourced from Conde Naste’s magazines.

If you’d like to improve your knife skills, Kitchen Knife Skills will let you do just that, while RecipePad for iPad is an intuitive piece of software for creating and recording your own recipes. You can even add a photo of your handiwork.

Those of you on a diet or fitness regime might find the Diet and Food Tracker app from Android useful. It measures exactly what’s goes into your body over any given period of time.

A helping hand in the kitchen

When you do find recipes you like, Kitchen Measures is a handy tool for converting unfamiliar units of measure to ones you can understand. And, if you’re in a habit of overcooking or undercooking dishes, QTimer can help. It’s a type of stopwatch app for getting your cooking times just right.

MyKitchen will help you manage your shopping list more efficiently. It’ll even let you send list as a text message to whoever is in charge of doing the shopping. Of course, many supermarkets now offer online shopping and some even have their own apps so you can order from the comfort of your own kitchen.

Getting down with design

When it comes to designing your kitchen, the My Beautiful Kitchen Design and Installation team are there to provide all the help you need, but if you need a little inspiration, there are quite a few kitchen design apps that can help, from digital measuring apps to augmented reality apps which will allow you place furniture in various locations to assess the outcome. Likewise, there are a host of colour scheme apps to help you with which colours will go best together in your new kitchen.

For inspiring ideas, you won’t need a coffee table full of magazines with the Houzz Interior Design app with one of the biggest databases of ideas for your home. Simply select the ideas you like and you can cut and paste them into your own digital scrapbook.

And once you’ve been inspired, don’t forget to call My Beautiful Kitchen on 0141 771 3640 for all the materials and craftsmanship you need to make your dream kitchen a reality.