Pepperplate: My New Favorite Food App

I consider myself a highly organized person but I think that vision is of a former self. Today my organizational tendencies lean toward drawers filled with files marked, simply, 2011, 2010 and so on. And while I’m usually able to find receipts, travel articles and school work (although I must confess I recently received yet another copy of some form my daughter’s school needed), it’s usually after a frantic search that has me wondering what I needed in the first place. At the end of the day, I suppose my system is more Lucille Ball than Martha Stewart.

That all changed, at least from a recipe collecting perspective, the moment I met Pepperplate. Pepperplate is like an aggregate recipe box, allowing you to import, via URL, recipes from popular food sites like Food & Wine, Food Network, Real Simple even the aforementioned Martha Stewart. There’s also a manual import function, which seamlessly formatted my own blog recipes by ingredient, method, URL and photo. There’s also a spot, once the recipe is configured, to add your own notes.

Now, instead of 100s of emails from my favorite food sites, I’ve got actual recipes that I can sort by user-defined category. When I’ve got a moment here and there, I’ll sort through my virtual email recipe collection, purging recipes in the “what was I thinking?” category and gaining excitement over recipes I’d long forgotten.

What makes Pepperplate so robust, however, is the menu planning and shopping list options. For Christmas, I loaded up a handful of recipes, added them to the planner, shuffled that to my shopping list, and voilà! A printable list, organized by aisle, that impressed friends I ran into at the market (one looked at her fistful of notes in disgust, telling me I was way more organized than she was).

Maybe Pepperplate will make an organized girl of me yet. It’s never too late to try.