The Best Thing That Happened This Week: At Long Last, A Genius App
Finally, technology we can really use!
The ClipDish app lets you take, say, an online recipe for pasta e fagioli, and strip away the annoying backstory. / Getty Images
So just this week, as we shivered in the cold, we realized we had all the ingredients in our cupboard to make a big pot of pasta e fagioli, that delicious Italian soup. What we didn’t have was a recipe for pasta e fagioli in any of our many, many cookbooks. Weird, but no problem. Forth we went to the internet, where we had to trawl through 3,495,762 entries for “pasta e fagioli recipe,” each one of them tarted up with personal reminiscences, cost-saving tips, artful photos of ingredients, pronunciation guides, blather about Nonna and Olive Garden, and a whole lot of showing off. What we couldn’t find was just a straight-up recipe for pasta e fagioli without all the crapola. Which is why we were absolutely freaking ecstatic to learn about Doylestown native Joe Cotellese’s brilliant new app, ClipDish, which strips out all the junk that you don’t want from cooking sites (hello, I don’t CARE that your Uncle Tony emigrated to South Africa after World War II) and delivers what you do want: the list of ingredients and the recipe. This is what technology was made for! We made some great soup. We didn’t take any pictures. Now go find your own recipe.
