Spin Your Way To Healthy Meals And More
Spinning Meals ($2.99) by Spinning Cook is a new app that helps users plan meals. The app maps out meals up to seven days in advance and creates shopping lists for the necessary ingredients. Designed to be an all-in-one meal-planning app, Spinning Meals has a recipe database, ingredient tracker, and meal planner.
Spinning Meals randomly selects dishes for dinner for up to seven days. Users can have meals chosen at random through the plan tab, or they can set meals for themselves. Although the app does have breakfast and lunch sections, there are no meal recipes designed for them. More often than not, users will receive a “does not fit criteria” error if they try to randomly plan breakfast and lunch meals.
The primary focus of Spinning Meals is in the recipes. The app comes with 15 preloaded meals complete with ingredient lists and cooking instructions. Users have the option to add their own recipes to the list. This process is particularly time consuming, especially when adding instructions and ingredients, so I suggest users type out this info on a computer or iPad and copy it into the app rather than trying to type it all on an iPhone. Once meals are all loaded, users can categorize recipes by category, time to cook, or by source. The cook time is especially useful; users can have the app choose meals that take less time to cook on certain days when they know they are pressed for time.
One of the most handy features of Spinning Meals is the shopping list. This list is automatically created based on what meals have been planned. Grocery items are organized by type (e.g., produce, dairy, spices, etc.), which helps users easily find what they need in the store. Users can check off items as they are purchased and also see what meals each item is used for. One improvement that could be made to the shopping list would be to compile the same ingredient into one quantity. As it is, an ingredient will appear multiple times if used for different recipes.
Overall, Spinning Meals is a useful app that helps users decide what to eat and plan their grocery lists. The app is useful as-is, but has plenty of room for improvement.
GIVEAWAY: AppAdvice has teamed up with Spinning Cook to offer our amazing readers a chance to win one of five promo codes for Spinning Meals. To enter the drawing, just leave a relevant comment below by March 18 (11:59 p.m. EDT).
Visit Spinning Cook’s Facebook page to learn more about their giveaway and a chance to win a $100 gift card.