Cooking Planit Review & Spice Set Giveaway!

In putting together our series on College Cooking, it has become clear that it is not just beginning cooks that sometimes feel intimidated about cooking. Planning and orchestrating a meal is not as easy as it looks on those cooking shows with the insanely happy hosts. While we have attempted to make our blog posts easy to follow, it can still be difficult to coordinate an entire meal.

Enter Cooking Planit. Cooking Planit is a personal cooking assistant for novice or experienced cooks. It provides a powerful set of simple-to-use tools that enables the cook to combine the recipes of multiple dishes into a complete meal. Cooking Planit organizes the cooking process and provides step-by step instructions so that all the dishes come out at the same.

You start off by choosing a full meal from the menu, or by searching. After tapping a title you are given a summary of the dishes and what ingredients and tools you’ll need. You can also select a single recipe from over 300 chef-tested recipes, or build your own meal. The app easily adjusts the quantities of the recipes to suit the number of people being served, as well as any dietary restrictions. When it’s time to cook, Cooking Planit HD breaks down the steps in each recipe, complete with built-in timers. The app tells you what time dinner will be ready to serve (a time estimate that changes as you work, so it’s always accurate); kind of like a GPS for your meal. It lets you know when you have a few minutes to take a break between steps, and maybe grab a glass of wine. There is even a limited voice control feature helps you manage the steps while cooking without having to touch your screen.

The integrated digital assistant also includes an aggregated grocery list. This feature is my favorite aspect of the app. It allows you to create accurate grocery lists that combine the ingredients of all meals/recipes you have selected which are then automatically categorized by grocery store aisle. It is easy to add additional grocery list items to make it the only grocery list you ever need. The app allows you to synchronize your grocery list with other family members and friends, access your cloud-synced account from your computer, iPhone and/or iPad, or print or email your lists. Do you already have ingredients in your pantry that you want to use? You can search recipes by individual ingredients in your pantry to find delicious meals you can use them in. While recipes are being added regularly, my only criticism is that I would prefer more options for side dishes (which currently seem to be skewed toward variations on couscous and orzo). I would love to be able to add my own recipes or to use recipes from other sites. Currently desserts are not included as a menu category. I would like to see desserts added as part of the menus option.

Cooking Planit is a free web service. When you register an account, you will have an individualized “planit” of your menus and recipes. Cooking Planit also offers iPhone and iPad apps for meal planning on-the-go. There is a free “Lite” version with full sample menus which users can register right from within the app. The fully-featured app (available on iTunes for $2.99) has all the elements of the online version. I actually prefer the navigation of the iPhone app which seems more intuitive.


Now that you have read all about Cooking Planit, it is your turn to explore the site and we will even reward you with a chance to win an awesome spice set (valued at $100) that includes 26 of the most commonly used spices.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Check out these 25 other sites for even more chances to win!

	Start	Stop	Blog	Blog
	3/18/13	3/24/13	Hungry Hutch	Food Fetish
	3/19/13	3/25/13	Cook the Blog	Three Diets. One Dinner
	3/20/13	3/26/13	Sugarfoot Eats	Gear Live
	3/21/13	3/27/13	CopyKat Recipes	The Mouthy Housewives
	3/22/13	3/28/13	Burnt Apple	The Butterfly Mom
	3/23/13	3/29/13	The Mama Report	Ancestral Chef
	3/24/13	3/30/13	A Food Centric Life	We Like To Cook!
	3/25/13	3/31/13	Dixie Chik Cooks	Baby Boomster
	3/26/13	4/1/13	Unorganized Mommy of 3	Much Ado About Fooding
	3/27/13	4/2/13	Better with Butter	The Primlani Kitichen
	3/28/13	4/3/13	Mother Would Know	California Country Gal
	3/29/13	4/4/13	Yi Reservation	NY Foodgasm
	3/30/13	4/5/13	ME Redone	Creative Cullinary