If you're a bit of a foodie (I'll admit, I can be at times), finding recipes on the web from databases is often a... terrible experience. While some repositories like Epicurious do hold themselves to a higher standard, many big sites will put up 28 different recipes for the same meal, 26 of which are awful and tacky "tweaks" on classic dishes without any pictures at all. It's not fun to dig through that.

So, if you're smart, by now you've probably discovered a few recipe blogs that are more "your style" - like The Pioneer Woman, or Closet Cooking. The problem, though, is that digging through these blogs, while it can be fun, isn't exactly time-efficient.

Foodster is a new app that hopes to change that, by indexing select recipes from dozens of popular food blogs and various recipe databases from all across the web.

The app is absolutely gorgeous, and while it's still pretty basic, it features most of the items necessary for a decent recipe go-to. You can create shopping lists (and automatically dump a whole recipe's ingredients into your list), mark favorites, tag recipes to create your own lists, and joy of joys, Foodster will sync all of this to the cloud using Android's native Google account authentication. That's pretty awesome, especially if you're using your tablet at home to search for recipes, then take your phone to the store with you when you go to buy ingredients - no more emailing yourself.

The big drawback? Recipes themselves send you to the browser for directions, because the app doesn't actually pull the directions, just the ingredients. I'm still convinced this is a great app, though, just for the reduced amount of web searches and paging through blogs I'll have to do in order to find a recipe.

Foodster packs well over 10,000 recipes, but for now, you can't filter results, search by recipe author (even though the # of recipes for each author is indexed), or browse by category. Search results (which can be done by keyword, or up to three ingredients) are limited to 20 recipes for each query, too, so you need to be pretty specific about what you're looking for. Or feeling lucky. Popular recipes for the week and month, and 'trending' recipes give you a little bit of discoverability, but more is obviously needed. Like I said, it's kind of bare bones right now.

However, I can already tell Foodster is well on its way to becoming a great app. It's quite pretty, and it gives me 90% of what I want in a recipe app: access to good recipes with pictures, ingredients, and authors who have established themselves in the online food community. Foodster only works with Android 3.0+ for the moment, and it isn't free, you'll need to cough up a buck ninety-nine. Which, for what you're getting, is pretty reasonable - it looks great on my Nexus 7, too, with a special tablet-optimized layout.

Hit up the Play Store to grab it now.