Tech Review: There’s a recipe for that

I’m new to the whole iPhone and iTouch scene.

I don’t have an iPhone, but I have had an iTouch in my house for about a year (it came free with a MacBook Pro). Up until now, I never really fiddled with it. But when I got a news release that Richmond-based start-up called You’ve Got Supper had a new app available, I decided to give it a whirl.

You’ve Got Supper is a website started about three years ago by two University of Richmond business school grads, Michelle Jenkins and Susan Aprahamian. The two college friends shared a love for cooking and launched a recipe website and newsletter.

The email newsletter delivers four or five recipes every week developed and tested by the two women and their families. It began as a subscription service, but a year and half ago they dropped the fee and offered the newsletter for free. After that they went from 500 subscribers to more than 20,000. Aprahamian said about a third of them are in Richmond, and the rest are scattered around the country.

And they are still growing fast, adding 3,000 last month, she said.

Most of their revenue is generated by advertising, but now they have a new source: the Apple iTunes Store. The You’ve Got Supper app (which launched last week) is $1.99. Sixty cents of that goes to Apple.

Aprahamian said part of the reason for launching the app is because her partner is obsessed with her iPhone, another is just to keep up with the times and explore new formats.

“We’ve seen customers go to grocery store and forget to bring the recipe. We thought it would be great to have it on the phone,” Aprahamian said.

Of course, since launching the app, some customers have requested it on the Blackberry, which they are looking into, she said.

So let’s play with it, shall we?

First of all, you will either need an iPhone or an iTouch and a WiFi connection.

For now the app loads recipes from an Internet database, but
Aprahamian said they are working on an update that will download all of the recipes onto the device so you can access it on an iTouch without an internet connection — in case you are say in the grocery store and can’t find a hot spot.

The app is very easy to use. On the screen you thumb through a wheel that has categories such as Produce, Meat/Fish, Ethnic/Gourmet, etc. Once you select a category, another wheel appears that has a full list of ingredients in that category.

I was impressed with the wide variety of ingredients listed, including pretty much every pasta you can think of and plenty more that you could never pronounce unless you were Italian.

Magnifico.

I decided to try a few things I had in the pantry/refrigerator that I didn’t quite know what to do with. I bought a bag of fresh cranberries on a whim during the last trip to the grocery store. So I dial in Produce, and then select cranberries.

Then you shake the device — which is a very common gimmick for Apps a la the Eight Ball of yore — and a recipe pops up. You can shake it again and another recipe will pop up, but as I would find later, not all ingredients have more than one recipe.

The result that came up was Cranberry Bread. Although I love to cook and have paid my dues in the kitchens of some Richmond restaurants, I am not a baker. So I decided to try something else.

How about the couple of acorn squash that have been sitting in my fridge for months? Unfortunately, the acorn squash was one of the ingredients that didn’t have any recipes listed.

I decided to look for quinoa, a grain indigenous to Peru, but couldn’t find in the ingredients list — one of the few omissions I came across. But while browsing the Ethnic/Gourmet section, I did come across something I had: soba noodles.

Soba noodles, a Japanese noodle made from buckwheat, are easy to cook, and I didn’t have much time so I decided to give it a whirl. I shook the phone like a pair of dice in Vegas (or even better, a Polaroid picture … Hey, yaaaaa), and up popped “Asian Chicken Salad with Snap Peas.”

Of course I didn’t have all of the other ingredients listed, so I had to swing by the store. After a quick stop at Kroger, I rushed home to put the ingredients together.

The directions were very basic and do not go into much detail. If you don’t know basic methods of cooking chicken, beef, fish, etc., watch a cooking show or go ask your mother. The recipes are for people who have some basic understanding of cooking.

One of the ingredients was cooked and cut chicken. I definitely had no problem handling that. But the first direction was “Toast sesame seeds.” I hadn’t done that before, so I just winged it by putting a little oil in a small pan and cooking them until they looked toasted. They toasted and tasted good, but I didn’t need the oil and it caused them to clump together.

Overall the dish turned out just ok, but I would blame it mostly on me whizzing through it.

I decided to test another recipe; this time I dialed in cauliflower and came up with “Roasted Cauliflower.” This was simple: Slice the cauliflower, cover with oil, salt and pepper, and put in a 425 degree oven for 25 minutes. This came out amazing, and I will probably never cook cauliflower any differently again. Thanks, ladies.

Despite a few limitations, I recommend getting this app if you have an iPhone or iTouch. Where there was no recipe for some ingredients, they are always adding new ones so hopefully one day I will figure out what to do with that acorn squash. The app is definitely a good way to inject some new flavors into your life. Even if you don’t follow each recipe exactly, it is a good way to come up with some ideas for yourself if you are getting bored with what you have been cooking at home.

Al Harris is a BizSense reporter. Please send tech review ideas or recipes to Al@richmondbizsense.com.