As several people pointed out, I never said what my context for encoding recipes was, so here's a bit more about what inspired this example. I throw a lot of dinner parties, and a lot of my friends have dietary restrictions. I always try to pick a menu where everybody can eat at least one entree and at least one side.¹ I want to be able to query my recipes for "vegan-friendly" or "peanut-free". But also a lot of recipes have substitutions: if a pork ingredient can be replaced by tofu, does that dish count as "vegetarian"? Maybe, maybe not, but it'd be nice to have the option to choose.
(The other menu constraint is the cooking process: I can't make two dishes that both take the slow cooker, but I can do two that both take skillets.)
I occasionally look for recipe apps but I never find any that are good for this use case. For now I still print out recipes and put them in a binder and figure out the menus on a whiteboard. So ultimately it's more an interesting example than a problem I'm trying to solve.
¹ I love them to death but I also a breath a sigh of relief when none of my vegan friends can make it
That's a really cool use case! Imagine if people could just list out what ingredients they wanted to restrict to (and pans, etc like you mentioned). Wait, this could also be taken one step further and account for calories!
As several people pointed out, I never said what my context for encoding recipes was, so here's a bit more about what inspired this example. I throw a lot of dinner parties, and a lot of my friends have dietary restrictions. I always try to pick a menu where everybody can eat at least one entree and at least one side.¹ I want to be able to query my recipes for "vegan-friendly" or "peanut-free". But also a lot of recipes have substitutions: if a pork ingredient can be replaced by tofu, does that dish count as "vegetarian"? Maybe, maybe not, but it'd be nice to have the option to choose.
(The other menu constraint is the cooking process: I can't make two dishes that both take the slow cooker, but I can do two that both take skillets.)
I occasionally look for recipe apps but I never find any that are good for this use case. For now I still print out recipes and put them in a binder and figure out the menus on a whiteboard. So ultimately it's more an interesting example than a problem I'm trying to solve.
¹ I love them to death but I also a breath a sigh of relief when none of my vegan friends can make it