For me, at least, cooking is easy. Deciding what to cook is the hard part, especially when the contents of my fridge and pantry are depleted. RecipePuppy is an app that should make deciding what’s for dinner a lot easier. It searches major cooking sites for recipes that use the ingredients you specify. You can search by ingredients only, or if you have a particular type of recipe in mind, you can add it as a keyword.
For example, let’s say you’re trying to decide what to do with chicken, onions and red wine. If you enter those ingredients into RecipePuppy, you’ll get back recipes that use them-in this case, mostly coq au vin recipes, but also recipes for other things like flautas, chicken provencal and more. You can also exclude certain ingredients. For example, let’s say you want to make beef stroganoff but you hate cream of mushroom soup. Search for stroganoff as the keyword and put “-cream of mushroom soup” in the ingredient box, and you’re good to go.
Do you need help deciding what you should be cooking right now? You can also use RecipePuppy on Twitter-just follow @Recipebot, tweet the ingredients you want to use, and get links to recipes that use them. There’s also a widget you can include on your site and an iPhone app to use on the go.
Most recipe search engines and sites have you search by keyword instead of using a list of ingredients, and they won’t let you exclude ingredients. The only site I could find that was similar to RecipePuppy was Supercook, which also searches for recipes based on specified ingredients. However, Supercook won’t let you add keywords for specific results-it searches based on ingredients only.
RecipePuppy’s user interface is clean and easy to navigate once you figure out how to search for what you want. A little more explanation of how to exclude ingredients would be beneficial, though. Looking at the example search without clicking on it gives a brand-new user the impression that you can type in “but without ingredient XX” in the ingredients bar to exclude a specific ingredient. You have to actually click on the example search and follow it to see how to exclude ingredients in a way that RecipePuppy understands.
RecipePuppy should be useful for everyone from experienced cooks to college students with the 3 am munchies and only 2 or 3 ingredients in the house. “Dude…we can make Chinese noodle candy with peanut butter, noodles and the rest of your chocolate bar! Yes!”
What do you think of RecipePuppy? Will it be useful to you?
Our Rating of RecipePuppy
Categories:web
Tool of the Day: Use @RecipePuppy to fetch recipes based on ingredients you already have at home. http://ow.ly/hpQw
RT @usefultools Tool of the Day: Use @RecipePuppy to fetch recipes based on ingredients you already have at home. http://ow.ly/hpQw