The main menu screen of the BigOven app gives you access to thousands of online recipes.
Thanksgiving and the holiday season are upon us. So, if you’re planning to prepare any festive meals, and perhaps you’re looking for a few new recipes to try out, BigOven is a free, interactive, advertiser-supported app that not only provides thousands of recipes, it also compiles a grocery shopping list after you select the meals or individual dishes you plan to prepare.
Upon launching the BigOven app, tap on the Great Ideas button to browse through recipe collections, menus, search a database containing more than 25,000 recipes, or discover ways to prepare leftovers and transform them into delicious meals or snacks. To use this app, an Internet connection is required.
From the app’s main screen, tap on the My Kitchen button to utilize a menu planning option, edit or review your personalized grocery shopping lists, or sort through your personal recipes (which can be sorted in a variety of ways, including by recipes you’ve made, ones you want to try soon, or your favorites).
The core BigOven app is available for free. However, to utilize some of the app’s core features, you’re required to set up a free online account with the BigOven Online service. This service allows you to save recipes you like, add your own recipes to the app, have customized grocery lists prepared for you, plan menus on a calendar, be able to print recipes and shopping lists and be able to share recipes with friends.
This is what a sample recipe screen looks like when the app is used on an iPad.
One thing you’ll discover about the free version of the app is that it continuously displays food-related ads very prominently. To get rid of these ads and access even more functions offered by the app, such as the ability to find recipes that cater to your specific dietary needs, or access nutrition-related insights when planning meals, you’ll need to upgrade to the BigOven Pro app for $19.99 per year.
The good news is that the free version of the app offers hundreds of Thanksgiving and holiday-themed recipes you can access at no cost. Each recipe includes a full-color photo, star-based rating, a text-based summary of the dish or meal, details about preparation time and the number of servings the recipes allow you to prepare, a detailed ingredients list, and step-by-step preparation directions.
The app is formatted for an iPhone or iPad, but it’s much easier to read and follow the recipes using the iPad layout. On the iPhone, the preparation directions are not as well-formatted for the smaller screen, which makes them too difficult to follow.
A few obvious features these app lacks are the ability to quickly change and customize the serving size (and then have the ingredients list automatically adjusted), the ability to print out the recipes (without upgrading or creating a membership), and preparation how-to videos. It would also be nice to see multiple photos for each recipe as part of the preparation section.
Available from the App Store are literally hundreds of other cooking apps for the iPhone and/or iPad. While BigOven certainly offers a nice selection of recipes and can be used for free, it’s not the most feature-packed or user-friendly app when it comes to catering to the needs of truly novice cooks.
Other free cooking apps available for the iPad, for example, include Food Network in the Kitchen and Must-Have Recipes from Better Homes and Gardens. If you’re specifically looking for Thanksgiving recipes, check out the GoJee Thanksgiving Recipe Collections or the Thanksgiving: A Bon Appetit Manual app.
One full-featured cooking app that’s both easy to use and that caters to the needs of novice cooks is the How To Cook Everything app ($9.99). It includes 2,000 recipes, plus information about cooking equipment, food preparation techniques, and meal planning ideas.
Also available from the App Store are a wide range of recipe and cooking apps for people adhering to very specialized diets. To find these apps, launch the App Store, tap on the Top Charts icon, and then select the Food & Drink category. You can also use the Search field within the App Store to manually enter a search phrase, like Gluten-free cooking, vegan cooking, or recipes for diabetics.
Beyond working as a highly interactive cookbook and recipe organizer, your iOS mobile device can also be used as a powerful communication, productivity, and organizational tool at work. If this sounds appealing, be sure to read the all-new, 4th edition of my book Your iPad At Work (Que), which has just been published.
Your iPad At Work is targeted specifically to business people and entrepreneurs. It covers all of the latest iPad and iPad mini models that run iOS 7 and can be purchased from bookstores nationwide, Amazon, BN.com, iBookstore, or Que’s website. It’ll also soon be available from Costco stores nationwide.
