ChickenPing

ChickenPing is a feature-rich, intuitive and fun application that contains a database with food, wine and cocktail recipes, enabling you to explore them, edit properties, as well as to create personal recipes and share them with the world.

After a fast and uncomplicated setup procedure, you are welcomed by a user-friendly interface, represented by a normal window with a plain and simple structure, where you can navigate the food categories, check out the name, rating and description for each entry, and click one to reveal the recipe.

ChickenPing shows the necessary ingredients, preparation time, whether the oven has to be preheated or not, number of servings, step-by-step instructions, snapshots, and paired foods the recipe goes well with. Of course, all this information can be edited, while photographs can be published on Flickr or Picasa.

What's more, you can create grocery lists and a culinary dictionary for unknown terms, scale recipes for less or more servings, share personal recipes with friends via email (Gmail, Yahoo, custom) or by uploading them to the developer's website, inspect nutritional facts, or perform a quick search within the database. In addition to foods, ChickenPing contains a database with wines and cocktails.

It's possible to use the contents currently available in the fridge to figure out what recipes you can make without having to drop by the grocery store, manage a digital wine cellar and view wine geographical origins, or change the components of cocktails.

The database can be exported to XML backup, HTML or RecipeML files, and you can import files from these formats as well as Food Data Exchange (FDX), MasterCook MX2 or plain text, and Reml.

You can print recipes, modify or convert measurement units, look up recipes via FatSecret or the ChickenPing online database, discover ingredient substitutes, or manage wine categories and snapshots, put together a meal planner, find restaurants via OpenDining, activate reminders (e.g. for the oven), as well as synchronize data with a Dropbox account or Windows Phone 7.

An important aspect worth noting is that ChickenPing offers multilingual support. However, this support can be extended. It had minimal impact on computer performance in our tests, and didn't hang, crash or display error messages.

After evaluating this app, we have come to the conclusion that ChickenPing is really fun to use and contains a surprisingly practical set of options for home cooks. It's a little rough around the edges but it has amazing potential. Plus, it has an app available for iOS users. No recent updates have been made, though.