Learn how to meal-prep these Easy Steak Fajitas from SideChef (Photo: SideChef)
Eat to live or live to eat? Either way, these trusty apps will not only enhance your dining experiences but also teach you a thing or two about the multifaceted world of gastronomy.
It’s wine o’clock! You are feeling adventurous, but don’t want to risk getting a bad bottle. Snap a picture of the label using the camera in Vivino and it will pull out all the information you need, including ratings, the winery, taste characteristics, average prices and recommended food pairings, in an instant. Set your own preferences to see what others with similar tastes are enjoying and leave your own review to help other wine lovers out.
Home cooking becomes a cinch with the popular SideChef app. Those who enjoy meal-planning can save their favourite recipes (tons of Asian choices, by the way!) and have the ingredients aggregated into a list for easy grocery shopping. The calendar function keeps track of scheduled meals so you can look forward to that Gochujang Chicken Stir Fry and Sparkling Lemon Drop Martini on Friday.
Ever had the dilemma of choosing between your favourite restaurants when ordering in? The local F&B operators at Coox work under a hybrid cloud kitchen concept and its food delivery app allows patrons to order dishes from across its brands, which include The Bao Guys, Elevete Patisserie, Burger Conspiracy, Super Boring Club and Tenka Katsu.
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Zero waste is practised in good taste with this recipe generator. If you lack inspiration and cannot bear to see that bag of tomatoes go to waste, key it in Supercook, along with other ingredients in your pantry and be presented with thousands of recipes that make use of what is available. It also features a nifty voice feature that conveniently records your ingredients. One less doomscrolling app, the better!
There is always a dish one family member makes that renders every other version incomparable. With Pepper, others will have the opportunity to recreate it as well. The app is essentially a social media platform for home cooks to share their own recipes. It is the perfect place to look for homely dishes that have been loved at the dinner table, giving new meaning to sharing your food.
If food photography is not quite your forte, then Snapdish will teach you how it is done. The app incorporates artificial intelligence into its camera and scores your composition as your phone orbits around that steaming bowl of laksa. The higher the score, the more attractive your picture. There are some nice filters in there too, to give captured images that extra pop.
Malaysian social enterprise What A Waste collects surplus food that it resells at a reduced price or donates to lower-income communities. While it has developed an app that links donors and recipients for the latter, it is still in its infancy. Nonetheless, this set-up is one conscious consumers can keep an eye on. For now, all updates are posted on its social media accounts.
Finally, someone has done it. Kudos to Ming Yan, who developed Leasy to rid the vexing “What to eat?” question that plagues Malaysians come lunchtime. Leasy is a randomiser that picks three restaurants according to the distance you are willing to travel and your dietary needs. You can only draw once per hour, so no going back for more selections. A split-bill function also eases the labour of post-makan mathematics.
This article first appeared on Aug 14, 2023 in The Edge Malaysia.
