Fed up of cooking the same old meals? Looking for inspiration to broaden your culinary horizons? Trying to use up those last tins in the back of the cupboard before venturing out for ‘essentials’?

Thankfully, you don’t need to buy a bookcase full of cookery books to find a great recipe – it’s all there on your smartphone. Here are some of our favourite cooking apps:

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1. Kitchen Stories Recipes

Get inspired by thousands of free recipes, skill tutorials and articles. You can even set up a profile and save your favourite recipes in personalised cookbooks.

Catering for all tastes, they offer vegetarian and vegan dishes, as well as low-carb, gluten-free and low-calorie options.

Download for FREE on iOS or Android

2. BigOven

Whether you’re a novice or experienced home cook you’ll find the BigOven app’s got a lot to offer.

Access more than half a million recipe ideas and find inspiration for dinner themes and meal ideas. You can even clip recipes from your favorite sites, upload recipes by snapping a photo, and mark existing recipes as a favourite to try later.

Download for iOS and Android

3. Change4Life Smart Recipes

If you’re someone who spends a little too much of your time microwaving ready meals or buying takeaway food, you probably aren’t eating as healthily as you should.

But it can be hard to come up with healthy recipes that you can cook at home from scratch – that’s where the Change4Life Smart Recipes app comes in. Created and endorsed by Public Health England, it gives you inspiration for tasty, healthy dishes for you and your family to enjoy.

Download for iOS and Android

4. Vegan Recipe Club

More and more of us are making the switch to a plant-based and dairy-free diet – but it can still be hard to find great recipe inspiration (especially if you’re a newbie).

Whether you’ve recently become vegan or have been for some time, the Vegan Recipe Club is a useful addition to your smartphone. You can discover more than 600 recipe ideas and tips to make cooking vegan meals a doddle. There are new vegan recipes added each week, and it’s easy to filter dishes by season or dietary requirements.

Download for iOS and Android

5. Cook With M&S

The Cook With M&S app, brought to you by the UK’s oldest purveyor of groceries, clothing, and household goods, contains hundreds of recipe ideas using ingredients that are readily available from any M&S store. If you’re looking for quick meal ideas or want to create a veritable feast, you’ll find it all in the app.

Download for iOS and Android

6. Forks Over Knives

For people following a plant-based diet, another handy recipe app is Forks Over Knives. Created by the makers of the critically-acclaimed film (of the same name), you can discover more than 400 meal ideas contributed by over 50 leading chefs.

Forks Over Knives makes it easy to search for and prepare a variety of dishes. Each recipe comes with simple cooking instructions, so even novice home chefs can have a go at creating tasty plant-based meals. It also helpfully provides a ‘shopping list’ feature, so you know which ingredients you need for each dish.

Download for iOS and Android

7. BBC Good Food

An old favourite – BBC Good Food is one cookery app you should definitely get for your mobile. As the name suggests, it was created by the BBC and offers users access to over 10,000 recipes. This extensive meal database comprises user-submitted ideas and recipes from the BBC Good Food team, plus a whole host of celebrity chefs.

It’s easy for anyone to create amazing dishes for any occasion, and you can also share your favourite recipes with other people.

Download for iOS and Android

8. Get a food box delivered

Running out of ideas and don’t want to brave the queues at the supermarkets then why now grab yourself a food box delivered. The beauty about these are you get all the ingredients you need to cook each meal and it is all perfectly proportioned so you. Some of our favourites are:

Gousto

Hello Fresh 

FestBox

9. Get BBQ’ing

Head on over to our ultimate BBQ for all the top tips on how to get your BBQ absolutely banging.