App Review: Allrecipes.com Dinner Spinner
Dinner is one of my favorite parts of the day. Figuring out what to make for dinner, on the other hand, can be a pain. There’s something about having to make this decision day after day after day…. I want it to be easier, and also more fun. The Allrecipes.com Dinner Spinner offers a little of both.
Not just for dinner: Despite its name, the Allrecipes.com Dinner Spinner is a comprehensive recipe app that includes breakfast, desserts, appetizers, beverages, salads, side dishes, soups, and breads, in addition to main dishes. Choose one of these categories, then choose a main ingredient (chicken, chocolate, and so forth), followed by a “ready in” option: 20 minutes or less, 45 minutes or less, over an hour, slow cooker, or “any.” Then select “View Matches” to get recipes sorted by relevance, rating, title, or popularity. There’s also a search function if you know what you’re looking for.
Plenty of options: Allrecipes.com is a popular cooking website where users can post recipes, and the Dinner Spinner app draws on 40,000 of those user contributions. The database is so extensive that even funny-sounding combinations can turn up some good choices; I tried combining the category “bread” with the main ingredient “shellfish” plus “45 minutes or less,” and actually came up with four matches, including two for crab rangoon. Yum! Sadly, however, I apparently took it too far when I tried combining “bread” with “chocolate” and “slow cooker.” No results for that one.
Are the recipes any good? This app draws on the website’s user-submitted recipes, which can be quite varied but often lean toward homey comfort foods; my search for quick fish main courses, for example, turned up several types of tuna salad and tuna melts, along with other recipes like blackened tilapia and Cajun-crusted snapper filets. Like the Allrecipes.com website, Dinner Spinner lets you see user-submitted ratings and reviews to help you choose the best dishes. It also gives you the prep time, complete recipe instructions, and nutritional information for each recipe.
Spin for your dinner: This is the most fun part, if the least practical. When you just want to throw up your hands and let someone else decide what’s for dinner, you can simply open up Dinner Spinner and then give your phone a quick shake. The app will “spin” each category for you in a kind of dinner lottery and give you results for whatever combination it has randomly selected. This can be fun because you might hit on combinations that never occurred to you—and after all, sometimes shaking things up is exactly what the dinner hour needs.
My recommendation: Definitely worth a spin.
Who would have imaginated that one day my daughters would be interested to cook? But since they discovered this app,cooking become to easy and to fun for them.