Weekend Cooking: Digital Cooking Edition

This week’s Weekend Cooking post is really more of a question. Can I turn this:



Into this?



When I had an iPhone, I downloaded a bunch of food-related apps. Whole Foods and Food Network both have apps that allow you to enter an ingredient – say kale or pork tenderloin – and get recipes for it. I thought those would be really useful, but in the end I didn’t use them very much. I usually make a menu for the week on Saturday or Sunday, and I never could change my habit of going through cookbooks while deciding.

One app we do use often is Seafood Watch. Designed by the Monterrey Aquarium, it’s a guide to the best and most sustainable seafood available in your geographic area. My husband takes that one with him to Wegman’s and checks out what’s available against Seafood Watch’s sustainability measures, and picks accordingly!

But the real prompt for this post was the increasing availability of cookbooks in e-book form. They’re almost invariably less expensive than the traditional paper versions. And they’d solve that obvious space problem on my kitchen bookshelves. So I’ve been tempted to give e-cookbooks a try. Two things are holding me back. First, the tactile part of me is wondering if it would be fun to explore a cookbook in digital format – I just love to read cookbooks. Second, the practical side of me is wondering how it would be possible to follow a cookbook in e-format. Would it be reformatted and optimized for my Kindle? Or would the recipe text flow awkwardly, making me toggle between pages?

Can you imagine how nice it would be to travel and have a bunch of your favorite cookbooks with you? Or to actually have the recipe that someone asks for at a potluck? That’s the part that’s tempting me! So what do you think, Weekend Cookers? Has anyone joined the e-cooking revolution? I would love to hear your thoughts!


Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page. Thanks to Beth Fish Reads for hosting!

A few words about Kindle for iPhone

I have created two additional rules for the What's in a Name 3 Reading Challenge: First, the books I'm reading are all non-fiction. Second, they must all be available on Kindle. I do not actually own a Kindle -- frankly, I am the kind of person who has trouble finding her keys 2 minutes after I've walked in the door. I was worried that if I did invest in an e-reader, it would just be another thing to find every time I finally found a few minutes to read.

But I do have an iPhone, and because I have kids, a husband and a job, I can usually be counted on to have my phone with me when I’m wandering around. So my husband, the person who is in charge of all technology issues in our home (he is the only guy, after all) mentioned I could get an app for the iPhone that turned it into an e-reader. I clicked, and downloaded. Let me say, I’m glad I did.

Kindle for iPhone is a very powerful app. Once you register your iPhone on the Amazon site, you can purchase a Kindle title and have it on your iPhone in less than a minute. The immediate gratification aspect of the app is amazing – but can also be a bit dangerous. Kindle titles are generally cheaper than paper titles, but $9.99 a piece (on average) still adds up!

The best features of Kindle for iPhone are linked to the iPhone itself. First, it is back lit. That means I can read myself to sleep without having to turn off the lights – might sound silly, but it really is a pleasant feature. It’s also great for long plane rides, since you don’t have to keep your light on to read, annoying those passengers who (curse them) can actually get to sleep on a plane – that is a group I will never understand.

Second, I almost always have my iPhone with me. So time waiting for my children to finish whatever activity they are currently building their kid-resumes with (dance class, swimming, dance class, piano lessons, dance class – you get the idea) has become a few minutes of reading time. It’s changed my attitude about idling in the car, that’s for sure! Sometimes I almost look forward to being kept waiting – at least when I’m in the middle of a good book. And that’s great for everyone.

Now, Kindle for iPhone isn’t perfect. The screen is small, which means you have to tap the screen often to turn “e-pages.” It doesn’t bother me, but I can see where it could be a pain. And for some content it’s just plain awkward. The book I’m reading right now is illustrated with old maps of the Indian subcontinent. Yes, you can expand the pictures on the iPhone, but looking at Goa without being able to see its position relative to Delhi is certainly not what the author intended. The pages with recipes have also been reduced so that the recipes fit on one iPhone “page” (they must look like illustrations in the hardcover version), rendering them a mousetype that is difficult to enjoy.

Those issues aside, I am really grateful for the Kindle for iPhone app. I am a professor, and do a lot of reading as part of my research, but I haven’t set aside much time for pleasure reading in the past couple of years. The iPhone has allowed me to steal back a little time for something I always enjoyed – getting lost in a good book!