Cooking three meals a day every day can become monotonous, especially if you’re juggling kids and work. It’s easy to get in a rut where you’re making the same meals over and over again. If you’re looking for some fresh inspiration but need meals to be quick and simple, check out Martha’s Everyday Food. A branch of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Everyday Food is famous for pairing the aesthetic of Martha Stewart Living with practical recipes any home cook can execute, no matter how busy life is.
Keep reading to learn more about a recipe app that’s guaranteed to shake up your cooking routine.
Like the article? You should subscribe and follow us on twitter.
Getting Started
Open the app and the you immediately recognize the familiar style of Martha Stewart Omnimedia’s Everyday Food brand: bright and cheerful colors paired with photos of fresh and simple meals. The home screen is a slide show featuring daily articles by Everyday Food editors. Topics include Healthy Eating, In Season, Cravings, On the Side, Sweet Spot and Weekend Chef. Tap a photo to view every article on the topic for the past week.
True to the Everyday Food brand, this app is colorful and packed with simple yet beautiful food photos. The home screen, right, is a slide show of current articles from Everyday Food Editors.
One strange thing about the functionality that may throw you off is when you select Dinner Tonight from the slideshow it takes you to the most recent recipe in the archive, not necessarily the recipe in the photograph. For example, Chile-Garlic Chicken is pictured above, but selecting it reveals a recipe for Artichokes in Oil. Tap on the days of the calendar below and you’ll find the Chile-Garlic Chicken recipe on Wednesday the 20th. It would be easier for users to understand if the browsing screen updated tiles to reflect current content.
Select a topic from the slide show (like Dinner Tonight) and you find an archive for the last week of recipes, left. Tap a photo to view the entire recipe, right.
On the positive side, it’s nice to see Everyday Food offering users more recipes to browse, and the weekly archive is always updating with fresh content. Another handy feature is the clock in the top right corner of the recipe. It lets you know how much time is needed to cook the recipe so you can quickly browse through the list. This is especially handy if you want to avoid takeout tonight but only have 15 minutes to cook. Tap the photo to see the full recipe description and instructions.
Sophisticated Search Feature
The Everyday Food app has much more to explore. If you’re looking for a recipe featuring a specific ingredient, tap the Recipe Finder at the bottom of the home screen. Here you can search more than four thousand Everyday Food recipes (more added each month). This sophisticated search tool allows you to set filters in four categories: Main Ingredient, Dish, Course and Time.
Open the Recipe Finder to search all 4,143 recipes using filters, left. My search for a 30 minute chicken salad to have a t lunch showed 16 recipe matches, to the right.
The search filters are very helpful and would be even better if you could search by holiday or special occasion, like Super Bowl recipes or Easter. Otherwise, this tool functions really well, quickly displaying accurate results for a good user experience.
Recipe Shuffle
Everyday Food magazine is known not just for quick and easy recipes, but also for helping home cooks prepare a multi-course meal for weeknight suppers that feels a little more special than one-pot cooking. Recipe Shuffle brings that concept to life using the unique capabilities of the mobile interface. The screen is divided into four regions, representing the Main Course, Side Dish, Dessert and Drink components of a single meal. Shake your iPhone and watch as a randomly selected combination of recipes appears on the screen.
Recipe Shuffle is a fun tool to inspire users with unexpected recipe combinations, left. Tap on the box to see the full recipe and Add To Favorites for easy access later.
This feature is fun and great for inspiring new flavor combinations when you’re in a cooking rut. It’s not always practical, though (like when you end up with tortellini pasta for the main course and orzo pasta for the side dish). Tap the photo to see each recipe and select Add To Favorites so you won’t forget where to find it.
Cooking with Everyday Food
Recipes in the Everyday Food app are easy to read when you’re in the kitchen cooking away. The recipe title is followed by essential information like how long the dish takes to prepare and how many people it serves. Ingredient lists include short instructions for prep work to make the actual cooking more efficient. Directions give every step of the process with plenty of supportive information to help home cooks understand the desired result and signs of being on the right track. Each recipe includes helpful Nutritional Information like calories, carbs, fat and protein breakdown. The only downside is a mildly distracting ever-present ad for an Everyday Food magazine subscription, even though they’ve stopped publishing it and instead incorporated Everyday Food into Martha Stewart Living magazine.
Recipes are clear and easy to read while you’re in the kitchen cooking, left. You can save notes to recipes, add a recipe to your favorites, create shopping lists or send a link of the recipe to a friend, right.
Additional functionality can be found at the bottom of each recipe. Tap Add To Favorites to save the recipe for later reference. Add To Shopping List saves the recipe ingredients in a handy form that allows you to check a box when you’ve purchased the ingredient. Your Favorites and Shopping Lists can be accessed only by selecting the button in the top right corner of the screen and scrolling through a list of options. It would be nice to see a quick access feature button instead. The Everyday Food app does a great job of making valuable information easy to share by text, email or twitter. Some recipe apps only let you share a promotional message like, “Here’s what I’m cooking now!” Everyday Food inserts a link to the actual recipe, which is the whole point of sharing. Lastly, the Watch and Learn tab is a collection of short instructional videos from the Everyday Food team. If you need a primer on basic techniques like Sharpening Knives or How to Shell Shrimp, the videos are an excellent resource.
Conclusion
Martha’s Everyday Food provides an excellent answer to the age-old question: What’s for diner tonight? The creators have done a great job of displaying a lot of content (thousands of recipes) without overwhelming users. The app is beautifully designed with fun features that make use of the mobile phone platform. In the past year, users have reported a lot of frustration with crashing issues, and it seems that the developers listened and tried to rectify these problems with the last major upgrade in February. I didn’t experience any problems with crashing during my testing. Overall, it’s a great app with plenty recipes for less than a dollar.