Epicurious, you bet yah!

Apps are everywhere.  Apps can pretty much do anything you want, need and anything you can and can’t think of.  As a Blackberry user, I found out with a tinge of sadness today that I’m missing out on some apps.  When I search apps for my phone I don’t get the enormous array of possibilities that are available on iTunes for iPods and iPhones and iPads – I’m jealous.

Whatever.

I found an awesome app.  It’s called Epi.  It’s a free app from Epicurious.com, an online food magazine, which pretty much entails every thing that deals with food and eating it.

The app allows you to search from over 28 thousand recipes from top chefs, popular cookbooks and leading restaurants.

           

          Identification principle

Epi answers the question “What’s in it for me?” by giving its users thousands of recipes at their fingertips.  People are busy.  Whether it’s a student swamped with schoolwork, a family busy running kids from play dates to piano lessons or a single guy planning a romantic dinner, Epi allows you to find recipes easily and create a list your of favorites so you can always find them.  No more hunching over cookbooks or searching the web, you can find recipes anywhere.

            

         Action principle

Epi not only helps users get recipes anywhere any time, it also makes preparing to cook easier with the shopping list feature.  By putting in what you’ve got in your fridge, Epi will find the best recipe for any occasion or diet.  If you do need something from the store, it creates a shopping list for you and checks off each item.  If you can’t make it to the store, you can send shopping lists via email, so if someone is out and about they can pick up whatever you need.

      Principle of Familiarity and Trust

Epicurious.com works together with familiar cooking magazines, like Bon Apétit and Gourmet magazine and use to have a cooking show on the Discovery Channel.  By using recipes from cookbooks, chefs and restaurants we are familiar with it gains the users trust  - we know it’ll be good.  iTunes says Epi has already had 1.6 million downloads and was voted Best Mobile Application in 2009 by the American Society of Magazine Editors.

            Clarity principle

Like I said earlier, I don’t have an iPod, that’s app compatible, iPhone or iPad so the only way I can really see the Epi app is to look at screen shots.  It looks to be organized into what type of meal you want to make for any diet.  Let’s say you want to make something with grilled meat.  All you have to do is click on “grilled meat” and recipes with pictures will pop up.  I love pictures because they always make my decision easier to make.

On top of making it easy to help you decided what to make, the shopping list function breaks down your list into sections, so when you are in the produce department you know what you need to get.

Now all I need is a 32G iPod.