Tech review: Tasty recipe apps full of meal ideas

The Yummly app boasts about 2 million recipes with features including timers, videos, tutorials and... — The Yummly app boasts about 2 million recipes with features including timers, videos, tutorials and meal recommendations. Credit: Yummly

By Peter KingSpecial to NewsdayMarch 3, 2019

What’s for dinner? Or for breakfast and lunch, for that matter? If you need some ideas for tasty, healthy and easy meals, these cooking and recipe apps will give you some food for thought.

Yummly

(iOS, Android; free)

Yummly has become a wildly popular cooking and recipe app because of the sheer breadth of its database: It boasts about 2 million recipes. But 2 million recipes can leave you feeling bloated, so tell Yummly the types of food or cuisine you like and it will winnow the results to a more manageable number. The app is loaded with extra features, including timers, videos, tutorials and meal recommendations.

Kitchen Stories

(iOS, Android; free)

A nicely done app packed with photos and videos, Kitchen Stories brings together recipes from everyday users and professional chefs. Kitchen Stories also has recipes for people with special dietary needs, including sections on vegan and gluten-free meals. Once you decide what you’re going to cook, the app will generate a shopping list with the right ingredients.

Tasty

(iOS, Android; free)

Tasty has thousands of recipes, but if you’re stumped on what to cook, it will also offer suggestions. The app, from internet media company BuzzFeed, features a robust search feature allowing you to filter recipes by ingredients or cuisine. Keep your phone or tablet near you while you prepare and cook the meal because Tasty offers step-by-step instructions that will help you avoid dinner disasters.

Allrecipes Dinner Spinner

(iOS, Android; free)

Eating has always been a social activity, but in the age of social media Allrecipes Dinner Spinner takes it one step further. In addition to thousands of recipes, you can access the “I Made It” feature to show everyone your dinner triumphs (or failures). The ingredients for each recipe can be saved to a shopping list, and names of some local stores that have everything you need will appear.

Rotten situation

Rotten Tomatoes will no longer allow users to comment on a movie before it opens. The online movie-review aggregation site says it has seen “an uptick in non-constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling,” about soon-to-open movies. Recently, the site was hit by a barrage of negative comments about “Captain Marvel,” which opens Friday. Many comments attacked the movie because it features a woman in the title role.

— PETER KING

Artificial intelligence, artificial people

While artificial intelligence is a hot buzzword in the tech industry, for most people it’s still a nebulous concept. But a stunning — and somewhat frightening — example of what AI can do has been put together by software engineer Philip Wang. His website, ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com, displays images of “people” created entirely from artificial intelligence algorithms. Refresh the page to see new images.

— PETER KING

Apps send Facebook sensitive user data

Several apps sent sensitive health information to Facebook without users’ consent, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Among the apps were menstrual cycle tracker Flo Health and Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor. After the report, developers of the apps “scrambled to stop sending” the sensitive information, the Journal said. The data-sharing is related to a Facebook tool that lets developers target app users with ads.