Sometimes you feel like homemade pizza among all the other holiday fare.

The holidays are upon us, and in the last few years, I’ve been tasked by my family to handle a lot of the cooking. Shopping for a bunch of different recipes at a number of different grocery and specialty stores can be stressful. Preparing a list makes this manageable. I have a two solutions: a sheet of paper with rows and columns, and a recipe manager app.

Low-Tech Solution: Paper

Most shopping lists consist of a series of ingredients that you’ll use for a recipe. That works until you find that you have to go to multiple stores and you can buy at more than one store. I used to have separate sheets for each store and list the ingredients on each sheet where those ingredients are available. However, that led to a lot of flipping between pages and often missing things.

My new solution is to list the ingredients I need in a series of rows, as one usually does. My big breakthrough came when I added a column for each store I planned to visit. I would make a mark, such as an “X,” in each “cell” where that ingredient is available. It looks like this…

When I buy that ingredient, I cross it off my list. That way when I visit other stores, I skip past that ingredient.

High-Tech Solution: Paprika Recipe Manager

I’m not an expert cook, but I can follow a recipe pretty well and can make some effective on-the-fly improvisations.

One tool that has been really helpful with this particular workflow is the Paprika Recipe Manager. The app can very accurately read a recipe from a webpage and parse the ingredients and directions into its own database. When it’s time to cook, you can browse the ingredients list to prepare your ingredients and then read the step-by-step directions. My favorite feature of the latter process is that Paprika detects times. Tap on the time, and your device starts a timer. You can have multiple timers going at once.

Paprika can also help you make a grocery list.

When reviewing a recipe, you can add the ingredients you don’t have to your shopping list.

• tap the shopping cart icon
• uncheck the items you already have
• add it to your list

As you shop, mark ingredients as complete.

No matter which way you chose, it’s important to remember that you shouldn’t rely on your memory. This is a stressful time of year, and you’re going to forget items if you don’t write them down, either on paper or with a digital tool like Paprika.

Happy holidays, everyone.