App of the Week: Keep Recipes

How do you store recipes? If you’re anything like the Accidental Locavore, this can take many forms, none of them optimal. Keep Recipes is supposed to help organize your recipes into one file where you can store them, no matter what the source and then make lists of ingredients available on your iPhone.

Since I’m currently saving recipes in two big binders, a couple of unsorted piles, a file on Dropbox , a file in Outlook and a couple of pages I’ve saved on my iPad, not to mention two houses with cookbooks, the idea of consolidating them is tempting, if a bit daunting! The Locavore took Keep Recipes for a trial run today to see if this was a possibility for when my desire to organize overtakes reason.

First issue: it’s made for the iPhone and a computer. While it works on the iPad, it’s not formatted for it, so working with it in the kitchen loses some of the joy of the big, bright screen. So how about an iPhone friendlier version? To really take advantage of it, you need to do most of the grunt-work on a computer. It’s there you can drag and drop the bookmark icon and once you do that, life becomes easier.

The Locavore tested it out on a recipe from this month’s Food & Wine for a Lyon Chicken With Red Wine Vinegar, since I was thinking of making it for dinner tonight. All I needed for this was a chicken, some more garlic and a couple of potatoes to mash with it, so I managed to make it through the store without having to refer to the app. Once I make it, I have the opportunity to take its picture, rate and comment on it and of course, share it with whomever…

The other two recipes I tried it out on were from an e-mail from my husband and a recipe Eric Ripert did on the Today Show last week. Pull them up online, highlight the preparation, hit the button and there it is. It also syncs with my iPhone almost immediately.

Rating: 4 out of 5 (I’m not convinced that cutting and pasting isn’t easier)

Keep  Recipes 

Developer/Seller: KartMe Inc.

Cost: free

Compatible with: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch

Website: http://keeprecipes.com/my-recipes