Gone are the days when holiday meal planning consumed a great deal of time just browsing through a wide variety of recipes. With so many food and drink recipe apps now available on iOS and Android, you can easily download a tool to help you build the perfect menu and even concoct your own signature drinks without so much hassle.
Don't worry if you're preparing your holiday feast at the last minute. Here are six of the best food and drink recipe apps that will help you create healthy holiday dishes and amazing cocktails ideal for the merrymaking.
Cooking Apps
Recipe Book: Christmas Dinner Recipes Cookbook
With more than 57,000 recipes listed, the free Recipe Book app for iOS offers an easy-to-use interface that organizes the food entries into more than 20 categories and 400 subcategories. It gives aspiring chefs a library of healthy dishes. A "Holidays and Events" category makes holiday meal planning a breeze, and each recipe uniquely shows a photo of the dish and "very well-detailed directions."
Recipe Book users can also build up their own Favorite List.
"Now, you can save your desired recipes for easy access the next time [you need it]; just click the heart button in the top right of the screen to save it as a favorite, and you will see it again in the Favorite tab on the Menu," writes developer Tha Noon.
EatingWell: Healthy In A Hurry
If you're a last-minute shopper who still loves a hearty and healthy meal, Healthy in a Hurry for iOS and Android is the app for you. The digital recipe collection, developed by award-winning magazine EatingWell, is designed to put "healthy recipes in your pocket," albeit there are only 800 recipes listed — just a fraction of the massive library offered by Recipe Book. But the entries are curated well and truly cater to the health-conscious.
The high-quality food photography also won us over, and the offline mode makes the app a convenient tool when you're already at the market and trying to recall the ingredients you need to shop for.
Your holiday meals will definitely be free of processed and unhealthy food with the help of Healthy in a Hurry.
Epicurious Recipes & Food Videos
The team behind Epicurious is making sure new and loyal fans of the app stay inspired thanks to fresh content added every day. More than 35,000 recipes are part of this award-winning collection by Condé Nast Digital, with entries categorized by theme or the cook's own skill level. You won't run out of ideas for your holiday meals.
The wide array of videos and the Seasonal Ingredients Finder make Epicurious a premium cooking app for the genuinely epicurious. The app is available across multiple platforms.
Cocktail Recipe Apps
My Cocktail Bar
The no-nonsense approach of My Cocktail Bar makes it a favorite Android app of professional and casual mixologists alike. It doesn't care about the thousands of cocktail recipes offered by rival mixology apps.
Instead, My Cocktail Bar works with the ingredients you already have in your own bar or pantry to concoct recipes that you wouldn't feel intimidated to make. The app even encourages users to customize their own cocktails and throw new ingredients into the mix.
This way, your traditional eggnog wouldn't simply be the typical bourbon, rum or brandy mix, but a signature drink with your own twist.
Mixology
With almost 8,000 drink recipes, Mixology for both iOS and Android is indeed the "ultimate drink and cocktail recipe app," but it's very easy to get lost in a digital collection that massive. Luckily, the developers of the app invented an ingenious slot machine interface that yields random cocktail recipes. But if you'd rather go through the collection yourself, there are 87 categories you can search through, from martinis to jello shots to punches, which would be perfect for merrymaking during the holidays.
PDT Cocktail
As a powerhouse collection of classics and house creations by the renowned New York City bar, the PDT Cocktail app has its pulse on beverages from one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities. This holiday season, you can browse 400 "meticulously tested" cocktail recipes by cocktail type or base spirit. PDT Cocktail is available on iOS.
What are your favorite food and drink recipe apps on iOS and Android? Sound off in the comments section below.
