I do love cookbooks—truly. Especially ones that were handwritten and passed down generation-to-generation. I’m lucky enough to have one of those from my husband’s family. But quite honestly, it’s not always a practical way to organize recipes, or even to use while you’re cooking. Unless you have one of those fancy cookbook stands, it just takes up too much space on the counter. Plus, what if you want to cook a recipe from the Internet? What do you do then? Don’t worry, I have an app for you. It’s called Paprika, and it’s my absolute favorite app of all time.
First, the app’s icon is a can of paprika. Given that paprika is my favorite spice to use, it already won some huge brownie points with me when I first heard of it.
Now Paprika Recipe Manager 3 is the app that you would get, and it does cost $4.99 in the App Store. It is a bit steep, but I promise you, it is absolutely worth every penny. And here’s why.
You can auto-populate recipes from URLs. No manual entering.
If you have a lot of recipes you love from Pinterest (or, I don’t know, from this blog) you don’t have to manually enter anything. All you have to do is place the URL in the browser of the app, and click “download.” The app will download all of the information and an image of the recipe. The only thing you’ll have to do is place it in the proper categories you want and click save.
You can organize recipes by category.
Speaking of categories, you can make your own! Kind of like you would with dividers in a handwritten cookbook. Separate your meals by type of meal, protein, drinks, or whatever else you want to organize it. Then when you’re in the mood for a particular type of dish—like a casserole or a stir fry—you can click on that category and it will filter out all of the recipes that you would need instead of endlessly scrolling through your rolodex.
You can set a meal plan for the week using the recipes in the app.
Meal planning has never been this easy, I’m sure of it! Once you pick out your meals for the week, you can actually organize them in the calendar portion of the app. You can even separate it by type of meal! So you can plan out breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and even snacks for every day of the week.
You can set grocery lists based on the ingredients from those recipes.
Once you pick out the recipes you’re going to make for the week, you can actually create a grocery list based on it. Click into the recipe and hit the grocery cart at the top, and it will prompt you to add ingredients from that recipe to your grocery list. You can check and uncheck items that you’ll actually need or not.
You can write out what’s in your pantry so you know what you have at the store.
Not sure what you have? The pantry feature will actually do it for you. You can enter everything you have from your pantry into your list, so when you go to make a grocery list, it will automatically uncheck the items you already have.The only thing to note about this feature is that you obviously have to keep it updated. So if you run out of something, you’ll need to remember to update the pantry and add it to your grocery list.
You can create menus for events.
Cooking for Thanksgiving this year? Hosting an intimate dinner with a few friends? You can plan out the entire menu in Paprika. You can even add the amount of days that menu is for—like if you’re planning food for a weekend trip! You can also add notes to each day if you need to plan out times to cook, or any other prep things you’ll need to be aware of.
No, this post was not sponsored, just pure love. However, I will add a little link right here so you can buy the app. If you cook as much as I do (especially if you’re still working from home), you’ll be thankful you have it. Promise.
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