Foodies with APPtitude

We love to eat and enjoy cooking. However, coordinating dinner either at home or out can sometimes present challenges.  Free smart phone apps make our lives easier. Whether it's figuring out which fish, fruits and veggies are safe, what to buy for a recipe, or when all else fails--how to get a reservation fast, there are apps for that.

Seafood Watch: The folks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium created a very cool app to help select seafood that's good for your body and the environment. Rated from avoid to best choice, fish types carry health alerts and sustainability factors. We've been carrying their hard-copy version of this information and this easy to use and fully functional app is a terrific upgrade. In case you don't know the fish by its English name, the app allows a search by sushi title as well.

Dirty Dozen: The Environmental Working Group people have been examining the chemicals in produce since 1993. We published an article about their work back in 2009. Their Dirty Dozen app is well researched, simple and easy to use. Make quick searches by which 12 fruits and vegetables have the most pesticides, which 15 have the least pesticides, and take a look at the entire list of 49 most purchased.

Smart phone apps make it simple to select the best quality and most sustainable ingredients, but what's for dinner?

Five highly rated and elegant apps bring recipes, shopping lists and consumer reviews to you in the grocery store aisles.

Epicurious: The thousands of recipes available at epicurious.com are in your hand with this app. Dishes can be searched by topic such as kid-friendly or low-fat, by course, by season or occasion, by dietary considerations, or by the searcher's cooking ability. Once the recipes are chosen, your shopping list is compiled instantly.

170,000+ Recipes - Big Oven: The bigoven.com site has hundreds of thousands of recipes uploaded by visitors. There are forums visitors create and join. It's very much a user-controlled site with over a million cooks signed up. The app reflects the free spirited nature of the website and has lots to choose from. Users can "Get ideas to use up leftovers," find out "what's cooking around me," and create "try soon" lists.

Betty Crocker Mobile Cookbook: Over 9,000 time tested recipes and an "I have this ingredient, what can I make?" function give this app a special nostalgic feel.  It has plenty of pictures, nutrition information and coupons for General Mills products.

Cook's Illustrated: Brought to you by the American Test Kitchen folks, this app has it all-the product reviews; recipes with the problem people usually have when making the dish, the goal and the solution for a perfect rendition laid out and addressed; and videos of the preparation. Better used for browsing the recipes they have than searching for a recipe you've been wanting to make, the breadth of this app more than makes up for the smaller number of recipes.

Dinner Spinner: The people from allrecipes.com have created an app that makes dinner planning fun. Searches by ingredient, course, dietary restrictions and "ready in" time are all available. Or if you want to play the odds, simply shake your smart phone or hit the spin button and a random selection of recipes and ingredients come up.

Opentable:  No time to cook or just not interested? Make reservations the easy way with the app from opentable.com. No need to call hoping for an open seat, available reservations are right there on your smart phone. Click on the time and fill in the number in the party and you've got reservations.

Urban spoon: When you're totally blank on what dinner will be and feeling lucky, the urbanspoon.com app will roll you a winner. Shake the smart phone and nearby restaurants display randomly. Read reviews by friends and other diners to help make the decision or use browse mode to seek out the perfect place. It's a fun app in your own neighborhood; it's a lifesaver when traveling.