For an elite few, cooking is an art form second only to music, painting and sculpting. To everyone else, it’s merely a formality of life, something we have to do to stay alive. Obviously, we could live off ready-made, pre-packaged food, as many people do, but what you must remember is this: many people are obese in this country, and it’s not just because we don’t have to hunt our food anymore...

Nevertheless, many people feel intimidated by cooking, especially when it’s something a bit fancy. Fortunately, there is help available in the form of Whole Foods Market Recipes (HFMR), which provides a wealth of information on how to create meals and dishes from natural and organic foods to more specific recipes for people with dietary requirements, such as diabetics, hardcore dieters, and people that can’t eat gluten etc.

The HFMR application is essentially a cooking aid, much like a cookbook or recipe website such as BBC Food. However, once you begin to explore the application you realise that it’s a lot more than just a cooking aid, and to label it so would be a gross understatement.

Sure, in essence it’s a cooking aid, but overall it’s more like an educational tool that will teach you how to eat healthily, what ingredients go with what, and how to prepare complex dishes from deserts, to mains, to healthy snacks and salads. And, all without the condescending, stomach churning oratory of Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson.

Appearance wise, the app is extremely well presented and easy to use. One of the first aspects of HFMR we tried out was the “on hand” feature. In this feature you simply input three ingredients that you have in your cupboard, and it tells you what you can make with them.

We had pancetta, pasta, and tomatoes lurking around in our kitchen. From these we were instructed to make Pancetta and Pecorino-Romano. HFMR gave us full instructions, told us exactly what we needed, and how healthy the meal actually was. Needless to say, it was a very nice meal, and one that we’ll be pulling out the bag again in the near future.

Granted, some food searches in “on hand” didn’t yield any results, but overall we found it to be pretty much on the money - providing you’re not attempting to make something with tuna, ice cream and a leek, that is.

Additionally, HFMR allows you to narrow your searches into different meal types - breakfast, lunch, dinner, salads, kids, budget etc - and provides enough unique recipes in each to ensure that you could probably go about 3.5 years without eating the same meal twice.
 
As we said, not only do you get full instructions and the calorific breakdown of each meal and ingredient, you also get pictures. Now this is only on certain meals, ingredients and dishes, but, after all, it is a free app, so the fact that you’re even getting pictures is a bonus.

Another nice touch is that you can use the app to search for Whole Food Market retail stores near by - just in case you’ve buckled under the pressure of Jamie Oliver to go organic, local, and healthy.

However, before you go thinking that this is just a shameless marketing tool to lure unsuspecting “foodies” into Whole Food Market shops, remember this: none of the food, ingredients, or dishes used in the application are branded in any way. In this sense, the WFMR application is all about the food, and nothing else - although, we’re sure it’s still quite an effective marketing tool either way...

All in all, WFMR is a solid app, which you will use over-and-over-again. It is a must have for anyone that likes to cook, wants to learn, or is sick of wasting money on over priced cooking books.