Once upon a time I was trying to find a recipe I knew my grandmother had sent me in an email. I thought I'd saved it in a Pages doc somewhere, or maybe it was still in Gmail, or on an archive disk. Or maybe ... As I dug through my computer files, I realized I had at least a dozen folders of bookmarks with Must Try or Recommended recipes, eats I never remembered when I was doing my bi-monthly meal planning. I needed a way to keep my cyber-recipes organized and all in one place. Obviously my Pages doc wasn't working for me anymore. So off to Google I went, in search of anything that could help me organize this culinary mess.

About the same time I got my first tablet, a little Android thing for Mother's Day that broke in the first few weeks. But I discovered Pepperplate had an app as well as online recipe box. I set it up, and continued to use it with my inherited-from-my-son first gen iPad, and then with my current iPad Mini. I had to do most of my organizing via my MacBook Pro, however, for the simple reason that Pepperplate's app doesn't allow you to add recipes. An annoyance I could work around, although it slowly grew more and more annoying. If only they'd make a few changes to the app! But Pepperplate hadn't had an update for their app in a long time, if ever, and the service is free. Would it disappear from cyberspace, taking all my recipes with it? What other options did I have? So I did what any OCD pregnant lady would do, and started looking.

Some of the main players I discovered are Yummly, Allrecipes, Evernote Food (or something like that - I'm not into the whole Evernote world), BigOven, Pepperplate and Paprika. I have specific needs and wants for a recipe organizer, so while I downloaded Allrecipes and Yummly, I didn't really play with them very much. They don't meet the minimum requirements of: Must be able to add my own recipes/edit the recipes I keep, Must have a meal-planning feature, Must be available offline because, believe it or not, I'm not always connected to the internet. I actually really liked Yummly and Allrecipes for finding new meals, so I'll probably keep them around, but they won't be my go-to apps for cooking or meal planning (and I could just as easily browse their websites so when my iPad is full, they'll go bye-bye).

I posted earlier, my initial thoughts. Now my update: I am still using Paprika, have not looked at Pepeprplate once and deleted the rest off my devices! Paprika wins!