Food-tech innovations, sites and apps.

Where to begin with so much online info on meal planning, nutritional information and more? Here's a few sites and apps I can recommend:

Pepperplate (www.pepperplate.com)

Pepperplate.com is a meal-planning site that gives you great flexibility. Type in your favorite recipe or the URL of one you find online, and Pepperplate puts it into a calendar for you. The thing that impressed me the most was the ability to import a recipe from another site simply by pasting in the URL.

From Pepperplate: "Pepperplate is a seamless digital cooking platform, which now syncs across almost any type of computer, smartphone and tablet. ... Manage your recipes, create menus, shop with ease and cook like a pro. ... Share your favorite recipes with friends and family via Email, Facebook and Twitter. ... Import recipes from your favorite sites and add your own from cookbooks, magazines or old family recipes. ... Combine recipes into menus for dinner parties or holiday meal planning.''

Cost: Free

MenuStat (www.menustat.org)

MenuStat is a sortable database of nutritional information from almost all restaurant chains that was created by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. It can be searched, sorted and filtered based on many variables. You can view nutrition information by menu item, food category or restaurant, and even track nutrition changes over time. For example, in one click you can see all the nutrient information for appetizers in a particular restaurant and then sort by sodium.

From MenuStat: "Foods eaten away from home are a big part of the American diet, accounting for one third of caloric intake and almost half of the average household's food budget. As people eat out in greater numbers, there has been increasing interest in learning more about the nutritional content of foods consumed in restaurants across the United States.

"By sharing restaurant nutrition information in a way that is easy to search and analyze, MenuStat provides a valuable resource for individuals and researchers interested in the nutritional content of restaurant foods and beverages. MenuStat is a free nutritional database of thousands of foods served by the nation's largest chain restaurants. It aggregates nutrition information posted on restaurant websites since 2012.''

Cost: Free

Edamam (www.edamam.com)

When you type the name of a dish into Edamam's recipe search engine, you'll see photos from all the best recipe websites (as well as all the other websites...