Food Monster - Vegan Recipes

Pros: Lots of interesting recipes for vegan and vegetarian dishes. Cons: 1) Many of the recipes are poorly written and clearly not edited or reviewed by the site moderators. Typos are common. Ingredients are often not listed in the ingredients but included in the preparation section, sometimes vice versa. 2) It runs a subscription verification every time I go on the app. I’m sorry, these are recipes, not top secret nuclear codes. 3) The option to “try it before you buy it” is extremely limited. You can scroll through a list of sample recipes but you cannot do even one search without subscribing. The cost is not unreasonable and you can do a minimum of 3 months, but still, people are going to subscribe based on perceived value, which is why they should offer a 7- or 14-day free trial. That way you get willing rather than resentful subscribers. 4) Every recipe has a share button. But it does not actually share the recipe, it just sends a link to the website so that the person I share it with can go through the same baloney described above. 5) There is no print option because they are trying to be environmentally responsible. But I like to print a recipe when I’m making it, not constantly refer to my iPad. So instead I take screenshots of the recipe and print those out which requires more pages and more toner than would be used if there was a succinct and well formatted print option. Everyone of these five items represents a bad business practice. Unless they clean up their act, I’ll probably not renew my three month subscription.

I don’t live in America, preferring to live in interesting, developing nations instead, which means that I cannot get a lot of the items I’m used to buying in the States. As a result, I make all of my own vegan cheeses, mayo, aioli, margarine, tofu, and more, but I’m often living in countries where there are foods I’ve never seen before, don’t know how to prepare. This app allows me to explore an item, say, BEETS, where I am presented with lots of great recipes accompanied by the most amazing photos. I always get so hungry using this app. The app is very well designed (thank goodness for that!), super easy to navigate, and even though I’m still just using the basic, free membership, I’m loving everything I find here. For only $20/year, hell yes I’m gonna subscribe. Whomever designed this app should be applauded. You can see how hard they thought out every step, thinking of almost everything, making it easy and fun to explore. I just posted this app on one of my vegan FB groups. I can’t say enough about this app. It is masterfully easy, so pleasing to the eyes, and jam packed with great info. SUGGESTION: A “Foods from around the world” would be grand. For example, I now live in Belize, where a popular root vegetable, cassava, is a staple. When I lived in Madagascar, we called it mangahazo (MAN-ga-HA-zoo), but prepared it totally differently. I’d love to see a section featuring these oft overlooked foodstuffs.

First, I will be the first to say the app is not perfect with drawbacks like no print feature and occasional glitches. But for menus this is fantastic for Vegans. Some complain the free app doesn’t give you directions which is true. But how many people purchase free game apps all the time to find purchases are the only way to be successful in the game. Come on people it’s not free to have the developer put in their own time and money to create a pretty classy vegan recipe app. How many complaining about this app work for no compensation and give away the work the do. One Green Monster has daily recipes with ingredients and directions. But to get them all when you need them pay the subscription. It’s worth it.