App Review: My Recipe Jar

“What shall we have for dinner?”

It’s a well-asked question, often with no satisfactory answer, particularly if you’re lacking time, lacking ingredients, and lacking inspiration. Well, this simple query led to a great idea for app developers Emma and Ritu (pictured below) – a virtual recipe jar.

Here’s what I love – both women are mums who devised their own system for choosing meals that their kids would eat. Every time they cooked something that their family liked, they’d make a note of it and put it in their own recipe jars. Sometimes they’d go looking for those recipes, other times they’d have a lucky dip in the jars and see what came up. They set about creating an app to embody this concept.

This iPhone and iPad app has a simple design with a couple of basic instructions to get you started. It allows you to organise all your recipes in one place, to create shopping lists, and create your own social network for sharing recipes. Whilst you can type in your recipes, you can also take photos of your recipes and save them in the app. Quick and easy.

Quite often inspiration strikes me when I’m halfway around the supermarket. I don’t have the recipe with me, so I rely on my memory, only to get home and find that a key ingredient is missing. Now, I simply look up the recipe in MRJ and load the ingredients into my trolley. If I’m really organised, I create the shopping list in MRJ in advance.

All of these features are fantastic, but I especially love the lucky dip option – tap or shake your device and leave the rest to chance. There’s a lot of charm about this app – the genesis, the idea, the look and the great features. It’s also good to know that MRJ will donate 10 cents for each app purchased to programmes aimed at breaking the cycle of hunger in the developing world.

You can get further information about My Recipe Jar on the website, or purchase it on iTunes.