"Cooking is my hobby, my release," she said. "And it was becoming harder and harder. All of a sudden, it is manageable."
But Anderson has an advantage I lack in my attempt to cook with my cell phone.
"I live and breath technology. It helps that I understand all the moving parts," she says.
Keith Hunniford, a Denver Internet consultant, designed listingly.com, a site where the whole family can add to-do items or grocery items to lists and access them anywhere. He has had more than 10,000 users since putting his site online early last year, and he's never advertised.
But there are techies out there who think this is kitchen overkill.
"It just seems like too much technology for something that isn't a problem," said Paul McNamara, online news editor and blogger at Network World, a trade publication for IT professionals.
He made fun of recipe retrieval on a hilarious blog entry, "5 Reasons You Need a Recipe Ready Cell Phone" (networkworld.com/community/node/22968).
"What you need at the grocery store is a high-quality, high-resolution display that is easy to modify. And the name of that display is paper," says Don Norman, an engineering professor at Northwestern University and the author of The Design of Future Things.
"Of all the stupid Internet food ideas I have heard, this one sounds not unreasonable," said Christopher Kimball of America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Illustrated magazine.
"But why do you need it? In the office, where everybody is spending 20 percent of their time doing nonwork work, people simply go to a Web site, print out a recipe, stick it in their pocket and stop at the grocery store."
That is my theory, too. But in the interest of this story, I set out for the grocery store with my pockets full of sleek, shiny, wireless devices and my head full of visions for a weekend of cooking.
But they were someone else's sleek wireless devices. My cell phone is as dated as go-go boots, and that's a problem for these new Web-access applications. Plus, you need a good-sized text-message budget.
While at the office, I went onto Epicurious.com and sent a recipe for a spicy breakfast pizza to the cell phone (for free). Rachael Ray had already fired off a handful of recipes to me there, too (for $2.99 a month). And there was allrecipes.com for last- minute inspiration.
At the store
I needed troubleshooting help almost immediately.
