
Show HN: I had issues organizing my favorite recipes, so I built this - x86mitch
https://www.feastgenius.com/
======
cproctor
My take was a little different; I wanted a CLI app that lets me search my
recipes, put menus together, and then see views for shopping and cooking:
[https://github.com/cproctor/cookbook/](https://github.com/cproctor/cookbook/)

One thing I'm looking forward to adding is tagging recipe steps as do-ahead,
mis en place, early, late, and last minute. This will make it a bit easier to
think through the mental gantt chart I use when cooking a dinner composed of a
bunch of dishes. Also a simple scraping utility for importing.

The thing all these have in common is that they're reactions against the
festering cesspool of hostile-UI, low-information-density, pages full of
affiliate links that are today's cooking sites. (NYT cooking very much
excepted.)

I wish we had a better mechanism for including more people in the project of
iteratively refining the way we think about life tasks and improving the tools
we use to think with. I think this is a great conversation and wish more
people who like to cook could participate.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
_(NYT cooking very much excepted.)_

This is a consistently excellent resource, and I love the many small,
essential bits of polish they've applied to their iOS app, like preventing
your iPhone's screen from turning off when you're reading a recipe.

~~~
shaklee3
Cook's illustrated/ATK as well, if you have a subscription. The quality is
superb.

~~~
inferiorhuman
Cook's Illustrated is great, their equipment reviews are top notch, and their
sweet potato pie recipe is my goto every year. Although like NYT they made
unsubscribing obnoxious.

Something I'm surprised I haven't seen mentioned is Serious Eats. J Kenji
Lopez-Alt does some absolutely excellent recipes (hello Halal Cart Chicken &
Rice).

~~~
ghaff
The main thing that bugs me about CI is that I subscribe to their website and
they _still_ want me to buy an upgrade to access all the content. I get that
there are subscription tiers but it just somehow feels a bit obnoxious to me.

Serious Eats is good too.

I used to use Epicurious quite a bit back when they were a pretty early-on
serious website for recipes. But with the demise of Gourmet and other sites
like the NYT upping their game, I don't consider them top-tier any longer.

~~~
shaklee3
I think really the most annoying thing is they try to brand themselves as
having 3 distinct shows, websites, and books, but they're all the same people
and company. Yet they make you buy a subscription for each separately.

~~~
ghaff
As a business, the whole enterprise are really masters at repackaging and
reusing to the point where it becomes more than a bit annoying. Though I like
them overall and mostly more so since Kimball departed.

(Though, speaking of reuse, Kimball basically went and made an almost clone of
CI that IMO was obnoxiously clode to a direct copy.)

~~~
shaklee3
While Kimball was kind of pompous, I like him much better as the host. Bridget
and Julia just don't seem as fluid, and everything about the show feels more
scripted. Although, I've watched milk Street as well, and bought the cookbook.
I have to say, the quality of milk Street recipes is nowhere near that of
America's test kitchen. I found the recipes to be bland and flavorless.

------
swalsh
I ended up building my own solution to this problem too (though mine is not
open to public)

The main thing I wanted to optimize was menu planning. So I wrote a genetic
algorithm which will generate a menu, add the score, mutate the menu in some
way, and iterate. In my database I have a rough price per ingredient, and my
families enjoyment of the recipe (though I have kind of a lagging gradient
which reduces the score per recipe to prevent duplication). I also have
included in my algorithm what I call slots. So something like a lasagna will
take 4 slots where as a stir fry will be 1 slot. I sync my schedule and break
it down to slots. This allows the algorithm to fit the recipe to the time
available. I dont score slots though otherwise short recipes always win.

Since the algorithm optimizes based on the week, but keeps a running inventory
it's pretty good at maximizing my grocery bill and family enjoyment. My
average grocery bill is between $40-$60 a week. And I cook 5 times a week.

~~~
koolba
How many people can you feed on $60 a week? Is this in the USA?

~~~
swalsh
I live in MA. This is for 2 adults, 1 4-year-old, 1 almost 2-year-old. I
should mention, this price does not include the cost of lunches (The school
provides lunch, my wife buys lunch at work, and I usually snack throughout the
day instead of eating lunch). Next, I don't buy processed or pre-made foods.
So I'll snack on nuts instead of chips. It started as a health thing (they're
always filled with sugar, and stuff) but i've found it's also saves a bunch of
money. I make my own stocks, and sauces. I cook a lot of chicken, and usually
I'll buy bone-in thighs. It started as a flavor thing (I find breast meat
flavorless) but it's super cost effective. A family pack costs $.99 a pound,
so for less than $5 I can get 2 meals worth of chicken, some bones for stock,
and some fat for schmaltz. The rest of the savings come from efficiency. My
program groups like ingredients, so I have less waste. A cart full of fresh
vegetables, some dairy products, a couple family sized proteins, the
occasional staple, and a few bonus treats for the kids is super cheap.

My bill also doesn't include alcohol. I've given up drinking mostly to boost
my night-time productivity, but I'll buy wine in bulk which I mostly use for
cooking, though I might have a glass with dinner.

------
x86mitch
Some Background:

Within the last year, I started down the route of eating out less and being
more conscientious of what I was cooking. Google searches are a pretty good
resource for finding recipes with one caveat, you can't store the recipes. I
would save my favorites to a folder in my browser, but eventually, that folder
became 120+ recipes links and ver time consuming to filter through when I
wanted to make something.

I built FeastGenius to solve the problem of finding and organizing all those
recipes. With the site, you can do the following.

\- Add your own recipes.

\- "Clip" recipes from anywhere on the web.

\- Find a recipe on the site you like? You can save it to your profile so you
can easily find it later.

\- Organize recipes into collections and share them with anyone.

\- Search from 20,000+ recipes.

    
    
        - plus filter by calories or macros (if your an iifym nerd like me).
    

\- Find the top trending recipes added to the site.

    
    
        - Since I'm on reddit way too much I thought it would be fun to use the same algorithm they do for 
          organizing trending posts.
    

I would love to hear the feedback from the hackernews community. I'll take the
suggestions into consideration as I continue to build.

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
This is a clever website! I like it. One thing that would be nice is letting
members directly download some sort of collection / list- preferably with
formatting- so that if your site ever goes poof everyone doesn't lose all
their data.

That being said, I do like this idea, and will see if I can introduce my mom
to the site in a bit.

How do you intend to keep this site alive long-term?

~~~
x86mitch
I appreciate the feedback. I'll add it to my list of things to do in the next
version of updates. How would you like to get that information, in csv format
or something else?

> How do you intend to keep this site alive long-term? Currently, the site is
> being hosted on Heroku so I can scale it as needed. I'll likely move it to
> AWS in the nearish future, but for now, Heroku is doing the trick. As far as
> longevity goes I do daily DB backups so in the case of an issue I can do a
> restore. If the site picks up in popularity I could also move to doing
> hourly backups.

~~~
jborichevskiy
Depending on how you're sourcing the recipes, a simple HTML-to-markdown
conversion might work.

Here's one that I found but there are quite a few out there:

[https://domchristie.github.io/turndown/](https://domchristie.github.io/turndown/)

------
crummy
I tried a few similar sites recently and settled on Paprika[1]. Not a big fan
of their pricing plan (pay per client) but they work OK otherwise and I think
they're probably the most popular in the space.

How would you compare your service to theirs?

[1] [https://www.paprikaapp.com/](https://www.paprikaapp.com/)

~~~
kt103099
Paprika has a really nice web clipping feature. Enter a URL, and it extracts
the recipe, separating out the ingredients list from the instructions. It will
even extract recipe from the comments in Reddit threads. I'll be walking
through the OP's site for interesting recipes, and clipping them with Paprika.

~~~
shaklee3
Cheftap has this as well, and it works great. Rarely you have to edit it to
fix something, since most of the time it pulls it from any website properly.

------
benawad
Cool project, I love that you can search by macros. A few points:

1\. Clipping recipes from different websites can be quite challenging because
of the varying html structures. I recently tackled this problem and I'm
curious what method you used to find recipe content within an html page? I
ended up checking to see if the website followed a Recipe schema [1] and if
not use a mix of heuristics to try identifying if a line of text was an
ingredient. I also was considering using machine learning in there, but
couldn't figure out a good way to incorporate it.

2\. Is there a reason you don't include the instructions of the recipe on your
website?

Awesome to see some fresh sites in this space. I built Saffron [2] which is
focused on organizing your recipes into digital cookbooks.

[1] [https://schema.org/Recipe](https://schema.org/Recipe)

[2] [https://www.mysaffronapp.com/](https://www.mysaffronapp.com/)

~~~
x86mitch
For this project, I used Spoonaculars API for clipping recipes. I would be
very interested in creating my own, similar to what you did. That would give
me more control over the process. Did you come across any open source repos
when you worked on your crawler?

> Is there a reason you don't include the instructions of the recipe on your
> website?

Yes, when users clip recipes from another source I want to make sure that
users need to navigate back to the original page to see the instructions. This
is to ensure the original author gets credit for it. If a user adds a recipe
themselves to the site then it will show the instructions. Here is an example
of a recipe with instructions for demo purposes,
[https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/everything-nice-jerk-
chi...](https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/everything-nice-jerk-chicken-legs-
ieb6yd).

~~~
benawad
I didn't find any good open source options

------
bpye
I quite like this - I have one suggestion though. Please convert between US
measurements and metric. I much prefer metric and for this reason tend to
stick to UK/European websites - but occasionally there will be something on a
US website I want to try - having to go through and convert is a chore.

It would also be great to be able to save known substitutions - like sometimes
I have to use plain flour and baking powder rather than self-raising because
it's what I have in the cupboard.

~~~
enobrev
Chiming in as another American who prefers metric measurements in the kitchen.

I do a lot of baking (mostly things made of sourdough) and always appreciated
that King Arthur offers the conversion on their recipes; So much so that I'll
generally check there first. When I'm working out a new recipe from multiple
different ones, I convert them all to metric in my own version.

I think the only thing I don't use metric for is <= half a teaspoon, because
the measuring spoon is far more efficient than trying to measure out 2g on a
kitchen scale that has a minimum of ~2g. And it seems silly to me to break out
the scientific scale for a 1/2 tsp of whatever.

~~~
Moru
Volume conversion to grams would be great for automation. I love how much less
dishes there is when you can use the scale for everything. Just zero the scale
and pour in flour. Zero again for the butter and so on.

~~~
bpye
Definitely - I currently do this by having a notebook where I write down
conversions, having worked them out on a calculator. Being able to do this
automatically would rock.

------
scottmcdot
Is it possible to promote some kind of consistency in measuring? My wife
disregards a lot of American cooking sites (am based in Australia) because the
conversion of cups/teaspoons etc is sometimes open to interpretation and can
lead to a disaster.

~~~
fredley
I cannot understand how anyone puts up with measuring stuff by volume (other
than liquids). 1 cup of flour is a hugely variable amount depending on how
compressed it is. Don't even get me started on heaped cups. For baking in
particular where everything needs to be very precise, it's bonkers to see
recipes without weight measurements.

~~~
hoistbypetard
In the US a kitchen scale is a relatively uncommon piece of equipment. I own
one, but that's primarily to service what some might call an unhealthy
obsession with coffee. Thinking through the kitchens of friends and family, I
can only think of one other that is similarly equipped. And that friend shares
my coffee hobby.

Some of these friends without scales bake quite a lot, and do a very good job
of it. I guess they're doing it on "hard mode" but they acquit themselves very
well.

------
solatic
Tangential rant:

The publishing industry pushes more and more cookbooks every year, and between
traditional cookbooks and more recent YouTube channels, most recipes are much
more fantasy entertainment than serious attempts at trying to get people to
take more control over how their food is made.

The problem is that cookbook recipes distort the flow of food preparation:

Find an appealing recipe -> look up the necessary ingredients -> buy the
ingredients -> take the ingredients home and make the recipe

This motivates people to purchase ingredients which are not in season, i.e.
purchasing tomatoes to make tomato salad when tomatoes are not in season. This
generates demand for produce which is lacking in flavor and nutrition, with an
outsize environmental impact due to being shipped thousands of miles[1].

The proper flow is to go to a local farmer's market -> buy what is local and
in-season (with a side benefit that it will be cheap, since the farmer has
little control over the date of harvest and everything has to be sold before
it rots) and in great quantities -> figure out how to make it once you get
home, taking advantage of other produce which is in season, fresh ingredients
which are available all year round (i.e. meat, dairy, eggs), and shelf-stable
pantry staples.

This flow yields food which is simultaneously tastier and more affordable -
but you have to learn how to cook as an independent life skill, and not
constantly rely upon recipes.

[1] See e.g. [https://www.amazon.com/Tomatoland-Industrial-Agriculture-
Des...](https://www.amazon.com/Tomatoland-Industrial-Agriculture-Destroyed-
Alluring/dp/1449423450)

~~~
apacheCamel
What kind of solutions do you think are possible for this issue? I can totally
see your point, but I am unsure how to fix it for a person who really isn't
interested in learning tons of recipes for each season.

I think the first flow is still fine, but maybe should just include going
local and buying in-season items.

Knowing what you eat is important but I can understand why people are drawn to
the easiness of a cookbook filled with recipes from any season.

~~~
kls
A reverse cookbook app, I have these ingredients, what can I make?

~~~
52-6F-62
Dieticians of Canada released a website and mobile app that does this. I use
it from time-to-time:
[https://www.cookspiration.com/](https://www.cookspiration.com/)

Edit: the site seems to work differently than the app. You can search by
ingredient in the app.

------
jonas21
Apparently the motivation behind creating Elasticsearch was also organizing
recipes.

[https://www.elastic.co/about/history-of-
elasticsearch](https://www.elastic.co/about/history-of-elasticsearch)

~~~
x86mitch
TIL. It's funny because one of my motivations for building this site was to
have a project that allowed me to work with ElasticSearch.

------
ako
Pretty happy user of anylist[1] here: contains all my recipes, when I go to
the shop I just select a few recipes and have a shopping list.

[1]: [https://www.anylist.com/](https://www.anylist.com/)

~~~
asdfgeoff
I haven't used the recipe feature yet, but AnyList is my go-to grocery list
app. Big fan of rearrangeable aisles, preferred stores for items, and the
ability to check off items in real-time on two devices in-store.

------
ahaferburg
I never quite liked the traditional way of how recipes are written. Ingredient
list followed by instructions. I hate it when I get to a point in the
instructions like "add the eggs" and now I have to check the entire list of
ingredients to see how many eggs the instruction refers to. It's a pointless
indirection.

What I do is what I call inline recipes. It's just the instructions, but
whenever an ingredients is mentioned, it also has the amount. E. g. "add two
eggs". Every amount+ingredient is underlined in red. That way I can skim over
the recipe easily when I'm preparing my shopping list.

------
navs
Great work. I love coming across projects like these. Inspires me to "hack"
and generally maintains my enthusiasm when the job doesn't.

A suggestion: \- remove the delayed image zoom when hovering over a recipe.
It's a bit jarring and it makes the webapp feel slow when it isn't. I'd
explore another way to display the information or just remove the delay
entirely.

~~~
x86mitch
Thanks for the kind words. This indeed was a hack project that I would work on
in front of the TV when I had time after work. It feels good to have it in a
somewhat "showoff-able" state. I think what made me stick to this project as
opposed to the number of other ones I've given up on is that this was
something I was using throughout the entire development. So I've been building
something that I want to use. To your comment on the animation delay, I agree
with you. I'll remove it in the next few days in favor of a better way to
display the information.

------
mnd999
The main problem I’ve had with recipe sites is that phones and tablets do not
mix well with kitchens. I end up printing everything out anyway and then no
matter how organised it is online, I end up with a pile of paper. The paper
gets wet and the ink runs in critical places.

Anyone got a solution to that one?

(Edited for long sentence)

~~~
Fezzik
I tried mightily to go all digital with recipes, but ultimately I went back to
3” x 5” lined note cards with optimally abbreviated instructions and
measurements. I use small magnets to attach them to the vent-hood over the
stove to keep them from becoming sullied. Using the refrigerator any other
magnetic surface obviously works equally well. All the recipes are stored in
an easily accessible wooden box that was handed down to me by my grandmother.
I find this to be the best solution.

------
hardwaresofton
[https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/javascript-alert-quot-
xs...](https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/javascript-alert-quot-xss-quot-
cjagaq)

You might want to add/move up reporting to the feature list -- this recipe is
currently on the front page.

------
jv22222
Nice work.

Since you've got this far I'll tell you about an idea I've had in the back of
my mind for years:

1) Slurp in as many recipes as possible from the internet.

2) Create a way to build a Food Framework by having a whitelist, and/or black
list of ingredients.

So, for example, a great way to eat if you have diabetes is plant based low
fat.

In this case you could create that Food Framework by whitelisting all
vegetables and grains.

Or let's say you wanted a paleo diet, then you could blacklist grains.

Or vegan, blacklist meat, dairy, eggs, etc.

Or no peanuts (for allergies etc)

3) Save your Food Framework and then the site only shows recipes based on that
framework.

I like the idea because

1) It can appeal to lots of niche groups who don't have great options for
something like that.

2) If you stick to the right food framework for you it could help you get
healthy, loose weight, etc.

Anyway, great work. Features you have there are great already.

~~~
matthuggins
Sounds like the app I'm building now. :)

~~~
x86mitch
Awesome! If you want to chat feel free to reach out to me. There are some
really good api's out there to help speed up the process.

~~~
swsieber
I'm also working on something like that for myself (because of a colicky baby
and hearing that low FODMAP diets help). Right now I have basic schema.org
recipe ingestion working.

I'd be interested in chatting about it, but you dont have any contact info
listed in your profile.

~~~
m_ke
Also working on some NLP and ML for parsing recipes at bite.ai so would love
to chat as well.

if you're using schema.org there's a nice filtered data dump from the common
crawl available here:

[http://webdatacommons.org/structureddata/2018-12/stats/schem...](http://webdatacommons.org/structureddata/2018-12/stats/schema_org_subsets.html)

~~~
swsieber
Oh man. This is such a great resource. I wish I could give you multiple
upvotes. Thanks for sharing!

------
mtlynch
This is neat!

When I was eating keto, I got frustrated with how bad the search functionality
was on all the keto blogs, so I made a similar tool It's a keto recipe
searcher/aggregator:

[https://ketohub.io](https://ketohub.io)

During this, I ended up going down a long rabbit hole trying to figure out how
to parse recipe ingredients properly, and eventually spun off a separate
ingredient parsing service:

[https://zestfuldata.com](https://zestfuldata.com) (the service)

[https://mtlynch.io/resurrecting-1/](https://mtlynch.io/resurrecting-1/) (a
3-part blog series on how I built it)

OP - if you're interested in adding ingredient parsing to the site, I'd be
happy to work with you.

~~~
x86mitch
Zestful looks awesome! I'll take the chance to look into it more over the next
few days. But looks like something that I would benefit from using :)

------
randaouser
For those who are price sensitive like me but want all our macros; my personal
app also scrapes the flyer for local grocery stores for ingredient prices and
runs a knapsack algo to reach my cost threshold and tells me what things I can
make

------
tarp
If anyone is interested in building a similar site themselves, there is a
static site theme for hugo[0] and jekyll[1] called chowdown. They both use the
Recipe schema[2] so importing and exporting recipes is easier.

[0][https://github.com/seanlane/gochowdown](https://github.com/seanlane/gochowdown)

[1][https://github.com/clarklab/chowdown](https://github.com/clarklab/chowdown)

[2][https://schema.org/Recipe](https://schema.org/Recipe)

------
tmaly
This looks pretty cool. I have been using a more pen and paper type method. If
I find a recipe I want to make, I will print it out. As I am making it, I will
note an adjustments I make.

If the family likes it, I will do a reflection on any further adjustments.
Finally I copy it into a hard bound book with lined pages.

I don’t add too often to this book as the initial filtering keeps average
recipes off.

------
sleavey
I usually save the recipe from the site directly instead of bookmarking it.
I've been burned a few times by a few of the big, spammy recipe sites
(Allrecipes, etc.) when they've taken a recipe down. No idea why, but all it
did was reduce my visits to their site from a few times per month to zero.

------
m-p-3
I like that you decided to not force users to connect to a social login, but I
would have liked the option. Not a problem for me as I use a password manager,
but having that convenience would be nice.

Also, I registered an account with my email address but it never asked to
validate my email address, it just created it.

------
servercobra
This is really awesome! I'm building something similar, but more focused on
weekly meal planning and weight loss. It's kind of amazing to me how many
people in this thread have all created their own systems for managing
food/recipes/meal plans.

------
JohnFen
This looks pretty nice. Is it only available as-a-service? I'm not satisfied
with the recipe server I'm currently using, and would love to entertain an
alternative (writing my own is about 30th on my to-do list).

------
optymizer
This site on a 24" 2560x1440 display feels like I'm using binoculars to browse
it: [https://i.imgur.com/bCDCDah.png](https://i.imgur.com/bCDCDah.png)

------
bpye
Another wish would be able to export (email) to my kindle. Using a normal
device is kind of a pain but I can let my kindle keep the screen on for a long
time and it's readable even at a bad angle.

------
paines
FINALLY, a recipe site, which is not drowning in ads! How refreshing.

------
jbillow2000
This is interesting but I just use my bookmark manager Bookmark OS for
organizing recipes [https://bookmarkos.com](https://bookmarkos.com)

------
swsieber
Ha. I started working on something similar recently. Many of the current sites
are hard to use, so it seems the space could use some fresh contenders.

So kudos, it looks nice - I hope you find success.

~~~
x86mitch
Thank you! I think theres a lot of improvement that can be done in the space.
Reach out to me if you want any advice on helpful api's I came across when
building feastgenius. I'll be more than happy to chat :)

------
SpyKiIIer
How is this different then the app/website CopyMeThat? I use that app all the
time on my ipad to save recipes from random sites to my own "recipe book"

~~~
x86mitch
I've never used CopyMeThat but I just looked through it quickly. It looks like
a good app for solving a similar problem that feastgenius is solving. I think
the difference with what I built is that it also calculates the nutrition
content per serving. This was important for me personally because I use the
app to search for recipes in certain macros ranges. For example, Finding
chicken recipes in a macro range of (carbs:30-50, protein:20-40, fat:10-20).
The search for feastgenius was built on top of elasticseach and in the near
future I'll be building out more features based around really robust
searching. I'll also be focusing time on building features for discovering new
recipes. I hope that answers the question :)

~~~
SpyKiIIer
Thanks for the great reply! Question: Answered!

------
casper313
Looks great! Personally I just use a markdown file and a bash script to find
and log recipes. Helps keep it offline when I need it and make quick edits to
recipes.

------
jchallis
Very nice app. I built something much cruder in HyperCard when I was 7 and it
is nice to see something with modern UX (and color photos). Well done.

------
pknerd
Why are you not using Google's _Rich Snippets_ for individual recipes? It will
not only help to get more traffic but also to rank better.

~~~
x86mitch
Thank you for pointing this out. I was not even aware of rich snippets. I'll
update the site to use this formatting as soon as I can.

------
StapleHorse
Is there any app/website that allows you to put what ingridients you have, and
shows you what recipes can you make with that?

~~~
vcoelho
There's several sites like that. I've used Supercook

------
mike_heffner
Very cool, a similar site I use is: [https://onetsp.com](https://onetsp.com).

------
boyka
How do you obtain the macros? Via API to MyFitnessPal or a similar service?
How do you make sure macros are accurate?

------
dddddaviddddd
I'm frequently frustrated at how unoptimized meal planning and preparation is.
Glad to see work in this space.

------
yoz-y
Looks pretty neat. One thing that could be useful would be to able swap
between metric/freedom units.

------
johnnyRose
Nice tool, I'd love to try it. Is your sign-up broken? It just comes back with
an empty red alert.

------
Kiro
People hijacking the thread with their own program without even commenting on
the submission. Nice.

------
gpickett00
I would use this if you had a category/filter for plant based recipes.

------
thesquib
I use eatyourbooks.com

------
rbreve
Nice, What did you use to make it? backend/frontend?

------
preya2k
Did you use any UI or CSS framework for this look?

~~~
joshmn
This is based on Material Kit. [https://www.creative-tim.com/product/material-
kit-pro](https://www.creative-tim.com/product/material-kit-pro)

~~~
x86mitch
️exactly. I don't have a lot of talent when it comes to front end design.
Having Material kit as a starting point was a huge help for me.

------
hopesthoughts
Thanks for this! I could really use it.

------
conradfr
I don't know how anyone can follow a recipe which use "cup" as a unit of
measurement.

------
arcticf0x
Did you try using google keep? Works really well for this kind of stuff ;)

------
oliwarner
This looks like a copyright nightmare.

~~~
bjoli
I don't know exactly what you mean, but recipes cannot be copyrighted in many
jurisdictions. Images are of course a different matter.

------
chooseaname
A while ago, I tried using various recipe apps. Then decided to build my own.
While sketching what I wanted I realized everything I tried to come up with
was overkill. There's a reason grandma uses a card file for storing her
recipes. But, I still wanted something on the computer. So, I just use a wiki
hosted on my server. I have a page that keeps bulleted wiki links to recipes
for each day of the week, for months and months. I also store the shopping
list. I can recycle a weekly meal plan just by copying and pasting it under
the new date. So easy and I can plan meals for the week in just a few moments.
The recipes are super easy to read on phone, tablet, computer or even printed
out.

For meal planning:

\---- ===== October 05, 2019 =====

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

== Shopping List ==

    
    
      * [[ShoppingList10052019:shopping_lists|Shopping List]]
    

\----

===== September 28, 2019 =====

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

== Shopping List ==

    
    
      * [[ShoppingList09282019:shopping_list|Shopping List]]
    

\----

For Recipes:

====== Broccoli and Cheese soup ======

====== Ingredients ======

    
    
      *     1 tablespoon butter
    
      *     1/2 onion, chopped
    
      *     1/4 cup melted butter
    
      *     1/4 cup flour
    
      *     2 cups milk
    
      *     2 cups chicken stock
    
      *     1 1/2 cups coarsely chopped broccoli florets
    
      *     1 cup matchstick-cut carrots
    
      *     1 stalk celery, thinly sliced
    
      *     2 1/2 cups shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
    
      *     salt and ground black pepper to taste
    

====== Directions ======

    
    
      -     Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. Saute onion in hot butter until translucent, about 5 minutes. Set aside.
    
      -     Whisk 1/4 cup melted butter and flour together in a large saucepan over medium-low heat; cook until flour loses it's granular texture, adding 1 to 2 tablespoons of milk if necessary to keep the flour from burning, 3 to 4 minutes.
    
      -     Gradually pour milk into flour mixture while whisking constantly. Stir chicken stock into milk mixture. Bring to a simmer; cook until flour taste is gone and mixture is thickened, about 20 minutes. Add broccoli, carrots, sauteed onion, and celery; simmer until vegetables are tender, about 20 minutes.
    
      -     Stir Cheddar cheese into vegetable mixture until cheese melts. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
    
    
    
    

Super simple and it works really well for me.

