Many a cooking app is thought of as convenient or utilitarian, and some of the more graphically enriched can even be considered beautiful. But it is the rare piece of software that can combine culinary content and design to arrive at an experience that can actually be called fun. Food.com’s free Every Day Is a Food Holiday app for iOS is one such treasure. Benefiting from civilization’s dubious achievement of having evolved to the point where there is at least one food holiday for every day of the year, the app provides a handful of recipes to prepare in celebration of each and every one.
So, happy Junk Food Day (July 21). Among the seven entries offered in its honor are nacho cheese Dorito chicken, which does not lack for mayonnaise, and a Snickers dip that combines chopped chunks of the candy with cream cheese and Cool Whip to create a sugary spread for dipping salty pretzels. Healthier eaters may want to wait until Zucchini Day (August 8) to test recipes, while breakfast mavens must hold off until November 28 to properly acknowledge French Toast Day.
Looked at another way, the app is a clever curation tool providing 365 lists of recipes, each centered on a specific ingredient or experience. With more than 475,000 entries in the Food.com online database, the app pulls a few top choices for each category. In some cases, there is surprising diversity. The French Fries Day (July 13) menu includes not only a classic recipe for fries themselves, but also for a cheeseburger and fries casserole, baked fries with chile peppers and cilantro, and a simple poutine.
Food.com is a division of Scripps Networks, whose brands also include the Food Network and the Travel Channel, a corporation that reach over 170 million consumers each month. This is to say that they know a thing or two about interactivity. Thus, this app contains simple, elegant searching and browsing features. It also allows users to transfer a food holiday to one’s device’s regular calendar with one touch. Naturally, there are share functions for Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, and because each entry also exists on the Food.com website, the app provides the ability to deliver a link to any of the recipes via text message, be it root beer pot roast for Root Beer Float Day (August 6) or guacamole stuffed deviled eggs for National Guacamole Day (September 16).
