Cooking software has expanded far beyond the old hyper card stacks of text recipes. If you are bored, frazzled or feeling unimaginative there’s an App for that. With the easy tool – for – everything interface that Apps have, you can now find out what’s for dinner with cooking assistants,  recipe spinners,  list keepers, and gadgets that will even tell you what to do with what’s in your refrigerator. There are Apps which offer coupons. Apps themselves are a revolution in software that turns all the information available into funtional power tools.  If a robot memorized every App in the App store the thing would be dangerous.  But darn, it could cook like a 4 star chef.
After reading reviews and testing several apps we found a few that were exceptional. MyShopping Lists was highly reccomended but turned out to be only a pretty good App. After trying both the Free and paid version of this one, we thought that the lists offered were far less complete than some of the others out there. The large font made it easy to read, and it might be of some use for miscellaneous items.  I’d give it a 4 out of 10.

Our Groceries was another one we tried which was similar. It also gave you the option of sharing lists with family members. Although that feature seems to be standard with almost all of the other grocery Apps. This one was a 5 out of 10.

Grocery IQ has the advantage of scanning bar codes off items with the iPhone. With the iPod Touch you just start to enter the barcode numbers or the name of the item and it will guess it. With it you are able to add your items speedily, and much faster than writing them down, or with any other Apps we tried.  It gives you the chance to organize the store you go to by aisle. So no more back tracking at the store because you put something down at the bottom of the pen and paper list. When you favorite the items, you can re – add them for weekly shopping. It gives you plenty of space to add lists for other store, and other items besides groceries too. If you regularly shop at a discount store for bulk goods, having the additional list is handy. It’s only 99 cents too. This App gets an 8 out of 10.

Whole Foods has an elegant shopping tool. We don’t have one in our area (South Eastern Ma.) yet, and frankly I could be a little envious. We prefer a local family market to the large chain stores any way though. With the Whole Foods App you can pick from their large selection of premade and deli foods. There are pictures of items, category filters for vegetarian and vegan, healthy food suggestions, calorie info, and recipes. It has tons of info and a very good grocery list function. And it is free. Too bad for me, and it gets a 9 out of 10.

Grocery Gadget is good for taking pics of food yourself and adding them to your list. It has a large drop down menu of products, but not as specific as Grocery IQ where it is all listed by name of manufacturer, like World Harbors Maui Mountain Sauce and Marinade Teriyaki 18 oz. And in Grocery Gadget I ended up typing the whole words ‘Teriyaki Sauce’ and it never made any suggestions and didn’t come up with the product I wanted. Grocery IQ had it in at “T – e – r” and offered several brands and a multitude of flavors. Typing “K – e – t” into both Apps brought different results in the Ketchup test. Grocery IQ offered about 30 different kinds of Ketchup in several different brands. Grocery Gadget offered the wrong word for auto fill as well as the spelling of Ketchup. But there were no brand names or sizes. Grocery Gadget expects you to input everything except for a rudimentary general shopping vocabulary. This App, not so geeky 4 out of 10.

AllRecipes.com Dinner spinner App allows you to pick from the two top spin wheels for Dish Type and Ingredients. At the bottom you tell it how much time you have and it will come up with some recipe suggestions. It’s fun and works fine. It’s a little short on recipes but the price is right.  It’s free. This one is an honest value, an 8 out of 10.

iFood Lite is a comprehensive cooking assistant free version. You can browse recipes, or choose from suggestions. To use the shopping list function you’ll need to get an account and sign in. So does the recipe box. There are recipe videos that are heavily laden with ads. It offers guidance with knife skills and decorating. iFood was ok to look at recipes, but they contained beaucoup Kraft cheese products. In the free version most of the functions are disabled because they want to sign you up. This gets a 3 out of 10.

A final warning that nothing is rosy even in the produce aisle. Most of the coupon Apps and some of the grocery list Apps were pretty shabby software that was thinly veiled attempts to just grab your information, and location. For now none of the coupon Apps seemed legitimate. Many of them have “offers” instead of coupons. Such at 15% off at a bycycle shop. What I’d really like is a real App of food coupons, instead of health and beauty aids or department store items.