People who are interested in this may also be interested in Cooklang, a simple plain-text markdown format for recipes: https://cooklang.org/ -- doesn't get much easier than that.
Thanks for sharing, I never heard of Cooklang. It feels like a DSL (Domain Specific Language). I'll study their implementation to get started on a niche ETL markup language.
The recipe importer is great, I was using paprika but there's always the issue of sharing the recipe with your friends. Here, I can share the recipe where they don't even have to login. The UI is responsive on the phone and the collapsing steps feature is just great. I'm not using the shopping list and meal planner on a daily basis.
Nice recipes and photos! Is your config publicly available, as in, how you went from their docker-compose to a snazzy subdomain behind https? Or did you use SWAG for the reverse proxy?
Hey there, Yes, I'm using SWAG, it has the mealie proxy-conf available. I just renamed it to my domain and that's it. My config isn't public at the moment but I'm working towards it.
I started reading a bunch of 19th century safari books recently and it took me a while to figure out what the heck they were talking about lugging about all those "mealies". It obviously was some kind of staple food, and it finally dawned on me they were dried ears of corn.
And pronounced not quite the same either as the usual Southern African word for "an ear of maize", or the products made therefrom, e.g. "meilie meal" (1) and "mieliepap" : corn porridge / grits (2).
I want to make a plug for Grocy[0] which has recipes and meal planning, but its core feature is inventory. It's a lot of work to get going, but if you keep a lot of non-perishable and frozen food it can help a lot with tracking what needs to be eaten and what you have.
Oh wow. So I recently built something similar for my own needs[0]. It's strictly mobile right now, but it serves my needs to get reminders on when things are about to go bad. Will have to dig into this app to see if I can integrate it
I've been using (and even built!) recipe organizers and complex meal planners for about a decade now. Recently I decided, screw it, and just powered up a little self-hosted wiki. Now I have a section for all the meals that we like to make, that everyone likes to eat and I copy/paste them in.
The epiphany was that 99% of the recipes I was storing were crap and I was wasting my time with a dedicated system. The wiki has about a dozen recipes now, with a new one getting added once a month, tops. It's really not so much work that I need a dedicated app just for recipes. Plus, wikis have really good change tracking, so I'm able to make little modifications without worrying about losing access to the original.
> Plus, wikis have really good change tracking, so I'm able to make little modifications without worrying about losing access to the original.
It's a really good point for user experience scenarios that are close to mine. I like to import recipes from places but most of the time what i need would be adding personal notes or making touches to those recipes without losing the original.
Not sure how important these are to most of the people tho
Not a head to head comparison, but having used many different recipe managers, Tandoor is the one I landed on. I think the ability to colocate ingredients alongside steps is very helpful for longer recipes.
When I started cooking I thought I needed something like this -- but what I found was that when keeping a recipe collection, over time I ended up with 10 different recipes for roasted brussels sprouts with different flavors mixed in and had slight variations on the basic technique. What I actually ended up wanting as I cooked more was to keep track of the basic technique I used when I made really good roasted brussels sprouts, along with a bunch of notes different variations or flavors to use with that technique, rather than a bunch of individual recipes.
Personally, I've found switching to using something like Notion or Evernote as more of a cooking 'notebook' than a recipe collection -- where you are not forced into traditional recipe structure for each page -- has worked really well for keeping track of stuff like this.
This is really awesome :D Looked for something like this a while ago and wasn't massively keen on what was already out there...
One feature I immediately tried to find, though (and then searched for a github issue for it and couldn't initially see) was to be able to filter meals by ingredients.
Not necessarily the 'fuzzy' search, but (similar to the include/exclude categories) have a drop-down list of ingredients for ingredient auto-completion and then select to add to a list of items.
And then the same for adding some ingredients that are excluded (e.g. want to do something with flour, but have no eggs)
I use google sheets :D because of the flexibility it offers.
It's accessible everywhere already, works good on mobile, so you don't have to haul laptops/tablets when cooking/shopping.
If i need extra notes on some ingredient, i just use some adjacent cell.
But above all - formulas. A lot of recipes lend themselves to calculations. Things like crepes (something superior to pancake) can be narrowed down to exact number of crepes you want. Same goes for ny cheesecake - dial the pan size and ingredients and baking time, temp are modified. Breads are basically fully formulaic so that is also covered.
Kcal[0] is my own project in this space. It’s still very rough (I don’t necessarily recommend using it, hah) but my spouse and I have been using it for a year or so now and it’s invaluable for our specific use case of a mostly plant-based diet but high protein needs because we are both very active. It’s a weird little niche (:
This is so cool! Got it running locally and it has all the features that my girlfriend and I would need. We're usually doing this planning on paper and it's quite some time involvement to be fair.
This can massively help. Thank you for the DB + API as well.
What I really would like is a recommendation engine for me personally. Basically: This is what you could cook today (you haven't cooked this for a long time, but like it or so).
This was one of my main goals too (having/managing a set of known-good recipes and some way to be reminded of which ones we should come back to), and I tried many digital-only methods, but none stuck. For the past few years my strategy for this is offline-first. I have a bunch of recipes in 'enhanced Markdown' (Markdown with my own additions, very similar to Cooklang that was on here a few days ago, but that didn't exist when I started my software) and a script to make a pdf out of those recipes (a nice looking pdf, I bought some 'cookbook templates' off etsy or something similar). I print that and keep recipes in a binder, annotate on paper, and every now and then I go back and work my notes into the Markdown recipes then re-render and re-print the pdf.
Then, when I do meal planning (usually in the weekend, depends on when we have a slot for grocery delivery) we (as a family) look through the table of contents of our family recipe book/binder and we usually eat (per week) 2 to 3 recipes from there, 1 or 2 from the 'we should try these' sources (printed recipes we come across, our newspaper has recipes daily, pinterest boards, youtube videos, ...) and 1 or 2 nights we have leftovers or takeout.
This planning ties in with an offline-first grocery shopping/meal planning system that revolves around a cork board with laundry pegs to hold that weeks planning, which my children made/decorated when they were little.
For a good chunk of the pandemic I used PlateJoy which did just this. You gave it preferences, and it told you what meals you were going to make that week and a consolidated shopping list.
I enjoyed it a lot, but eventually my life got too busy to cook that often and I was growing slightly tired of the recipes, plus they got acquired so I don't know what their future holds. But maybe you'd find them valuable?
I tried the demo but I didn’t find the meal planner. I mean let say I want to plan the meal for a month by choosing available recipe for each family member.
Is it on the plan?
I think its finally time to convert your 'family recipes' book to your own database to share with the family.
And there aren't many good free solutions out there that are user-friendly and accessible everywhere easily. Desktop apps don't cut it anymore especially now that you want to share something in your family's chat group.
People have also started gathering/modifying their own recipes from sites all over, so importing recipes is becoming crucial, especially with certain diets and a personal <insert diet> plan.
It's a spicier version of ToDo app that you build to test out new stack. Sick of doing another todo app for learning experience, but this time with Rails+Vue instead of Symfony+React? Let's make a recipe site instead, this one has pictures!
I know, I've built one myself when learning new stack. Way more fun than todo app.
A theory: recipes are algorithms (and datastructures), and every human programmer -- and all their friends and family -- have to eat. So there's a reasonable likelihood that programmers will (consciously or unconsciously) pattern match that and develop systems to assist.
If I remember correctly, Doug Engelbart's Demo[1] included a feature to organize a shopping list.
And the history of Elasticsearch[2] also began with recipes.
Is there a highly configurable app for sorting groceries? I’m currently using the pro version of copymethat [0], and it does a decent job of figuring out what aisles certain products belong to, and then let me sort those aisles however I want.
But what I can’t do, is telling it that I don’t have "eggs & dairy" but instead those are two sections in different places (and still properly sorting). I also can’t save separate orders for the aisles, one REWE has aisles sorted X Y Z, the other might be X Z Y. And I also want it to know about some local brands. "Deit" (German no sugar soda) gets currently sorted into "Other" by default, while I want it to be in "Beverages"
I even tried to make something like that myself, but besides my lack of knowledge of ML, I also had issues getting the proper data in a clean format, I ended up having to create a 100 item dataset which then (either in general or because I didn’t know what I was doing) was not enough to get good results.
