We were saying last week that now it’s harder to prepare our meals carefully and cook complex recipes due to our lack of free time. However, people want to eat well and there are many of you who still enjoy cooking and trying new recipes.

That is why, in this first Cooking Week’s post, we are going to talk about Android recipe applications and the best ways to cook your favorite meals easily and quickly.

The first of them is Recipe Search, based on the website www.allthecooks.com and a really useful tool when searching recipes. You just have to type your favorite ingredient and choose if you want to search by the recipe title, the ingredients or even the directions. Recipe Search includes a wide selection of meal recipes and the possibility of adding your own and uploading the pictures of the results. You can also write your suggestions and doubts in the website’s forum and talk to people with the same interests.

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Epicurious is a really popular application based on the website with the same name that helps you find the best recipes for your favorite meals. It has over 28.000 recipes and categories (weeknight dinners, desserts, cocktails, healthy lunches and so on) so it’s a really complete applications for people who enjoy cooking. The search engine is really useful as it lets you browse the recipes based on the origin of the meal, the nutritional information, the main ingredient, etc. In addition, it includes a shopping list feature too.

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The last one for today is Food on the Table, a new and excellent discovery. In addition to the many recipes that it includes, this application shows you a list of recipes especially designed for you. It uses your favorite meals (which you’ve preivously chosen) and the ingredients on sales (because you’ve previously entered your zipe code and your three favorite grocery stores).

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Are these among your favorite recipe applications? Do you usually use them to prepare your meals? Let us know!

Enjoy a delicious week, AndroidZoomers

Throughout the last 50 years, the humanity has reached such technological development that has even changed our lifestyle. Technology, instead of freeing us from doing things, has introduced in our life the concept of “multitasking”. Today, we want to be everywhere, know everything, meet everybody and do it as quickly as possible. This makes us more efficient, more aware of what’s happening around and even… smarter(?). However, we’ve forgotten something behind in this rush: caring of ourselves.
Technology isn’t enemy of healthy lifestyle. Otherwise, technology provides us with some tools to monitor, advise and oversee our habits. We can barely change our work/school scheduled to leave away our stressing life. But that’s not an excuse to integrate healthy habits in our day-by-day. Technology can help us with that issue. Specially the technology that is always with us: our smartphones. This week we’re discovering Health & Fitness apps. In this post we’re going to focused on Fitness apps. Let’s zoom in it!

Jogging is one of the healthiest sport you can practice. Thanks to Endomondo you will have in your pocket a GPS tracker of time, distance, calories and speed. It records your personal bests and allows you to share them through Facebook. Thus, you will show your marks off and challenge your friends. What’s more, you can use it with accessories: headphones or pulsometer. It’s set in a user-friendly UI that allows us to manage it with simple actions. Although it can be used for other sports, jogging is the one that best fit with it. A truly recommendable choice to monitor your workout due to simplicity and accuracy.

RunKeeper is a simple and good-looking tool that tracks distance, time, pace, calories, heart rate (if you use a complementary cardio equipment) and path traveled on map. It uses GPS to track on the map your routes. Actually, you can set them before going out jogging. It makes statistics on your progresses. This is even easier to manage than other. Actually its simplicity is its strongest point, specially for those that don’t need detailed info. However, we’re missing more useful data as speed average, max and min elevation or more stats graphs. Set in a good-looking layout, this is the choice for those wh areo looking for a simple running tracker and doesn’t want to rack their brains with detailed data.

JEFIT is an app to design your gym workout plan and track your progresses. Choose your training type: full-body, specific muscles, cardio-training etc. Choose the exercises you wan to do, schedule your workout in a calendar and start to getting fit.  It shows pictures of different exercise and how to do it properly, target repetitions advising, time… The amount of exercises available it’s just insane. What’s more, you can sync your progresses with Jefit.com where you will find forums, advises, stats and many more features. Actually you can even check stats from the app. If you want to show everyone your progresses, you can share them on Facebook and Twitter. This will keep you motivated. The only flaw we’ve noticed is that’s a bit difficult to get the hang of it. If you do so, this is going to be one of the best bodybuilding tools you can find on the market.

Happy fitness apps discovering!