Product review: Nigella Quick Collection iphone app

I recently offered to review an iPhone app for the Nigella Quick Collection. This app contains lots of recipes ideas for quick meals, laid out in 6 steps or less, and allows you to choose what to cook based on what key ingredient you have available. My little one is too young to cook with just yet (and he hasn’t enjoyed the purees I’ve slaved over) so I used the app with my three nieces, age 6, 14 and 18. They older two nieces decided to make something for dinner and the younger niece wanted to make some cakes.

For dinner we picked chicken with chorizo and cannellini. Although we had chicken we didn’t have any of the other ingredients so had a quick trip to the local shop. The shopping list option on the app was really useful as all the ingredients were saved in one handy list. The list was also broken into different areas such as fruit and veg, meat and store cupboard. We increased the ingredients by 6 as it was for a family meal and substituted kale for spinach as our local supermarket didn’t even know what kale was!

The girls enjoyed the short introductory video clips and the voice control option was perfect for sticky fingers! The app was simple for them to use as they both had smartphones, the videos loaded quickly and were the right length and it was nice to have the option of watching them – rather than being forced to watch.

When dishing up they followed the picture on the app so the finished dishes looked perfect!

Empty plates – although the cannellini beans weren’t to everyone’s tastes.

We also made the Snickers and peanut-butter muffins which contained 3 Snickers bars and 6 tablespoons of crunchy peanut butter (you can see why these appealed to a 6 year old!). She found the app simple enough to use as she loves playing with iPhones and quickly got the hang of moving through the recipe and following each step which was on its own page. She required more help with the baking but loved reading out each step and being in control of the iPhone!

The cakes were a popular choice and delicious!

We enjoyed trying something to cook with the iPhone and found it much easier to use than a bulky cook book. It’s really easy to use for little hands and made cooking fun and a bit different. We had also never tried a Nigella recipe before and were pleased with all the different meals, snacks and  treats which were taken from her cook books so it was a great introduction to her style and recipe ideas! We will definitely be using this app again!

The Nigella Quick Collection iphone app is available on itunes.