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Does anyone know of a cookbook that provides complete meals? The ones I’ve had recommended all assume you kinda know what you want to make. But I want someone e

Does anyone know of a cookbook that provides complete meals? The ones I’ve had recommended all assume you kinda know what you want to make. But I want someone else to tell me what to make, and I’ll just put it all together.

papa_bear 8y ago
It's not really a cookbook, but check out my website https://www.EatThisMuch.com/ https://www.EatThisMuch.com/ You can set it to just one meal if you want (and something like 600 calories) and keep regenerating it until it looks like something you'll like. I started it because I'm terrible at thinking about what I want to eat :)
- riteshpatel 8y ago
  This site is really well made! Nice job!
  - papa_bear 8y ago
    Thanks! We've been working on it for quite a few years, and steadily improving things bit by bit.
- pkd 8y ago
  This is very well done. I just wish there was a Google login instead of Facebook.
  - papa_bear 8y ago
    Thanks! We've been meaning to add Google login at some point, but I usually forget which one I used when other websites offer multiple options, so I've been a bit hesitant. It's probably a non-issue if we can just link multiple logins to the same account.
- dmos62 8y ago
  I love this! I'm having trouble balancing my diet, largely because I don't put in the time in research, and this does all these things. Great idea. However, I follow a vegetarian diet (as in 95% of my intake is vegetables, legumes and grains), and the generator is having trouble composing meal plans. It says so if you click on Details next to the calorie target. The picked meal plans differ from the carb/fat/protein targets significantly, and the meals are all uncooked: salads, smoothies and deserts. So the vegetarian "menu" doesn't really work, unfortunately. I thought that the database is severely skewed towards animal-based diets, but if I pick "anything" in the diet menu, I still get mostly salads, sandwitches, scrambled eggs, and stuff like yogurt, nuts, cheese slices, with some meat and eggs here and there of course. What stands out is that most things seem to require very little preparation. Is this tool oriented towards people unexperienced in the kitchen? Or maybe people who don't want to spend time preparing food? That's a nice option to have, but to only have recipes like that is a bit strange. Also, since I was told by a physician I should avoid raw vegetables and eat them well cooked (I used to eat raw or minimally cooked in the past), at least 3/4 of the suggested meals are no-go for me.
  - papa_bear 8y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! You're right that the default settings are pretty skewed towards simple meals. We need to make these options more prominent I think, but if you click the 3-dot menu next to a meal's title, you can change the allowed prep-time and desired "meal complexity". The meal complexity has a huge impact on what recipes are available, and if you bump a couple meals up to moderate or complex, you'll get a lot more variety. Let me know if that improves things at all for you (I think a lot of the more interesting vegetarian/vegan dishes probably fall under a higher complexity setting).
- sischoel 8y ago
  How about an option for restricting sugar intake? I tried your website with a diet of 1500 kcal and the suggestions are roughly twice the recommended daily amount (which is around 30g, I think).
- bobbyT314 8y ago
  Some more (helpful) suggestions: For two meals I'd love to pick which meals, because I prefer eating a late breakfast and dinner, and the meal options seem to be dependent on the type of meal. Ability to limit sugar amounts (or carbohydrates) without limiting to paleo or no wheat. Being able to nix certain things (like protein shakes, not my thing). I know that you can just refresh, but I'd rather be able to veto something all together. But great work!
  - papa_bear 8y ago
    Thanks! You can do those things if you create a free account - once your account is set up, you can exclude recipes by ingredients or keywords, as well as customize the layout of meals or create your own meal types (there's a big "Edit week" button in the top right of the planner). There's a lot of customizability, but it's been a long-time problem of ours figuring out how to make all the options intuitive to find/use without overwhelming the user. If you dig into it any more, let me know if you have any other feedback!
- mbesto 8y ago
  Thank you for making this...this is incredible! Sent to my sports nutritionist too.
- smilebot 8y ago
  This is amazing.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  What a useful tool! It's an answer to a problem I've had for years, which I've had no idea how to formulate in order to solve. Thank you for making and posting this.
- Cd00d 8y ago
  Thank you for creating this. Some feedback / feature requests: My family is 4 - a 4 yr old and a 1 yr old in the mix. They eat what we eat. So, I put in one meal for 1800 calories, which is roughly dinner for two adults and half dinner for two toddlers. Ideally, one adult would have enough leftovers for lunch the next day. The main results I got included egg dishes or oatmeal, so very breakfast heavy. The option to choose meal type would be great! Planning our family dinners is a significant friction point in our lives - we have a very difficult time thinking about what we will want, getting the food ordered (we primarily do grocery delivery), and getting it on the table quickly (we pick the kids up from care at 6, do the playground, and then quick cook to try to have family dinner 7-730. This resource has so much potential to remove or minimize that friction and I really appreciate it!
  - papa_bear 8y ago
    Glad to hear it! You can swap meal types when you create an account, but if you don't want to create an account, you can edit the settings on Breakfast with the 3-dot menu (and even just name it something else like Family Dinner). At the moment, you can set an integer multiplier on a meal to have it scale up the ingredients (it's the Family Scale setting on the Meal Type). However, it will still be based on your own nutrition targets, and you might want to set it for 3 people and split one serving between your two kids. If you wanted something more targeted for each of your family members, would it still be appealing to you the planner said something like "You eat one serving, your wife 0.8 servings, and each of your kids 0.4 servings", with some gram weight measurements, or are exact nutrition targets not super important for your needs?
    - Cd00d 8y ago
      Thank you for the reply. For my use, exact nutrition targets are not super important, but I could see families all going in on a new diet plan together as a resolution. Might be a good feature to implement before New Years! Best of luck!
- mrpopo 8y ago
  I don't really like this. When I am cooking, I am not watching my calorie intake and sodium/cholesterol levels. I want to enjoy cooking with fresh, local, seasonal ingredients. No choice anywhere in the options to choose the region, the season, or base ingredients. This is just encouraging a supermarket-shopper lifestyle that needs to disappear ASAP (imported agriculture/greenhouse produce growing is amongst the worst climate offenders).
alwaysreading 8y ago
My family really enjoys the recipes in Magnolia Table by Joanna Gaines (Fixer Upper) - https://amzn.to/2S1vQvI https://amzn.to/2S1vQvI
crispyambulance 8y ago
Well I don't know what you mean by "complete". That is very culture dependent. But I think you'll want to explore cookbooks with two different approaches. I got 2 recommendations... * Opinionated -- "The Art of Simple Food" by Alice Waters. This is a comprehensive cookbook covering many different recipes with words on technique and lots of background about the ingredients and how to use them effectively. It doesn't make assumptions or gloss over stuff. * Ingredient-focused -- "Market Cooking" by David Tanis. This focuses on recipes using ingredients that one finds in farmer's markets. I like this approach because it is a smart idea to start with what is good/fresh and available in your location first, and then find recipes for it, than the other way around. Both of these will give some guidance about what goes with what in terms of flavor and ingredients.
swish_bob 8y ago
I'm quite fond of Gordon Ramsay's "Sunday Lunch". It's essentially a series of 3 course meals. One of the nice things is that it's laid out with instructions that assume you're doing the entire meal, so it has a section on what to do the day before, 4 hours before serving, 1 hour before, etc. It helps quite a lot if you haven't a lot of experience managing the timings of several dishes to arrive at the same time. Something I used to struggle with when I first started cooking.
diegs 8y ago
https://www.cooksmarts.com/ https://www.cooksmarts.com/ is amazing. 4 complete meals per week, can tweak serving sizes and dietary constraints, takes seasonality of vegetables into account, strives to have overlapping ingredients, tells you what you can prep ahead of time, great video guides to fill gaps in your techniques, and the food is generally fast to prepare and quite tasty. You can also easily search the back catalog of recipes if you don't fancy the current week's meal plan.
eoinof 8y ago
The Family Meal is a good place to start. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11955187-the-family-meal https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11955187-the-family-meal Good mix of base sauces & 3 course meals..
tootie 8y ago
How to Cook Everything is the one cookbook you should own. It walks through all the basic cooking techniques for every type of food. Including how to select, prep and store. What kinds of foods can be cooked the same ways. It's like a home cooking textbook.
acomjean 8y ago
platejoy? Well its not technically a cookbook, but... Its a y combinator company and does meal planning online. If you have some diet restrictions its useful. I does seem to grocery list/ knows what you should have in stock (digital pantry based on your shopping list). We've been using it a couple years now (after dealing with the overflowing vegetables from a CSA) and its been good. Lost a little weight too. [1]https://www.platejoy.com/ https://www.platejoy.com/
peterwwillis 8y ago
Go to MapCrunch, click "Go", copy location into Google Maps, look for "restaurants", pick a restaurant, look for menu, select an entree that looks good, and put it together. I got Perth, Australia, found a restaurant, found the menu, and found this entree: "Chicken Breast filled with Camembert Cheese & Spinach. Served with Mediterranean Vegetables, Pear potatoes, Broccolini & Sun-Dried Tomato Coulis".

papa_bear 8y ago

It's not really a cookbook, but check out my website https://www.EatThisMuch.com/ https://www.EatThisMuch.com/ You can set it to just one meal if you want (and something like 600 calories) and keep regenerating it until it looks like something you'll like. I started it because I'm terrible at thinking about what I want to eat :)

riteshpatel 8y ago
This site is really well made! Nice job!
- papa_bear 8y ago
  Thanks! We've been working on it for quite a few years, and steadily improving things bit by bit.
pkd 8y ago
This is very well done. I just wish there was a Google login instead of Facebook.
- papa_bear 8y ago
  Thanks! We've been meaning to add Google login at some point, but I usually forget which one I used when other websites offer multiple options, so I've been a bit hesitant. It's probably a non-issue if we can just link multiple logins to the same account.
dmos62 8y ago
I love this! I'm having trouble balancing my diet, largely because I don't put in the time in research, and this does all these things. Great idea. However, I follow a vegetarian diet (as in 95% of my intake is vegetables, legumes and grains), and the generator is having trouble composing meal plans. It says so if you click on Details next to the calorie target. The picked meal plans differ from the carb/fat/protein targets significantly, and the meals are all uncooked: salads, smoothies and deserts. So the vegetarian "menu" doesn't really work, unfortunately. I thought that the database is severely skewed towards animal-based diets, but if I pick "anything" in the diet menu, I still get mostly salads, sandwitches, scrambled eggs, and stuff like yogurt, nuts, cheese slices, with some meat and eggs here and there of course. What stands out is that most things seem to require very little preparation. Is this tool oriented towards people unexperienced in the kitchen? Or maybe people who don't want to spend time preparing food? That's a nice option to have, but to only have recipes like that is a bit strange. Also, since I was told by a physician I should avoid raw vegetables and eat them well cooked (I used to eat raw or minimally cooked in the past), at least 3/4 of the suggested meals are no-go for me.
- papa_bear 8y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! You're right that the default settings are pretty skewed towards simple meals. We need to make these options more prominent I think, but if you click the 3-dot menu next to a meal's title, you can change the allowed prep-time and desired "meal complexity". The meal complexity has a huge impact on what recipes are available, and if you bump a couple meals up to moderate or complex, you'll get a lot more variety. Let me know if that improves things at all for you (I think a lot of the more interesting vegetarian/vegan dishes probably fall under a higher complexity setting).
sischoel 8y ago
How about an option for restricting sugar intake? I tried your website with a diet of 1500 kcal and the suggestions are roughly twice the recommended daily amount (which is around 30g, I think).
bobbyT314 8y ago
Some more (helpful) suggestions: For two meals I'd love to pick which meals, because I prefer eating a late breakfast and dinner, and the meal options seem to be dependent on the type of meal. Ability to limit sugar amounts (or carbohydrates) without limiting to paleo or no wheat. Being able to nix certain things (like protein shakes, not my thing). I know that you can just refresh, but I'd rather be able to veto something all together. But great work!
- papa_bear 8y ago
  Thanks! You can do those things if you create a free account - once your account is set up, you can exclude recipes by ingredients or keywords, as well as customize the layout of meals or create your own meal types (there's a big "Edit week" button in the top right of the planner). There's a lot of customizability, but it's been a long-time problem of ours figuring out how to make all the options intuitive to find/use without overwhelming the user. If you dig into it any more, let me know if you have any other feedback!
mbesto 8y ago
Thank you for making this...this is incredible! Sent to my sports nutritionist too.
smilebot 8y ago
This is amazing.
scrollaway 8y ago
What a useful tool! It's an answer to a problem I've had for years, which I've had no idea how to formulate in order to solve. Thank you for making and posting this.
Cd00d 8y ago
Thank you for creating this. Some feedback / feature requests: My family is 4 - a 4 yr old and a 1 yr old in the mix. They eat what we eat. So, I put in one meal for 1800 calories, which is roughly dinner for two adults and half dinner for two toddlers. Ideally, one adult would have enough leftovers for lunch the next day. The main results I got included egg dishes or oatmeal, so very breakfast heavy. The option to choose meal type would be great! Planning our family dinners is a significant friction point in our lives - we have a very difficult time thinking about what we will want, getting the food ordered (we primarily do grocery delivery), and getting it on the table quickly (we pick the kids up from care at 6, do the playground, and then quick cook to try to have family dinner 7-730. This resource has so much potential to remove or minimize that friction and I really appreciate it!
- papa_bear 8y ago
  Glad to hear it! You can swap meal types when you create an account, but if you don't want to create an account, you can edit the settings on Breakfast with the 3-dot menu (and even just name it something else like Family Dinner). At the moment, you can set an integer multiplier on a meal to have it scale up the ingredients (it's the Family Scale setting on the Meal Type). However, it will still be based on your own nutrition targets, and you might want to set it for 3 people and split one serving between your two kids. If you wanted something more targeted for each of your family members, would it still be appealing to you the planner said something like "You eat one serving, your wife 0.8 servings, and each of your kids 0.4 servings", with some gram weight measurements, or are exact nutrition targets not super important for your needs?
  - Cd00d 8y ago
    Thank you for the reply. For my use, exact nutrition targets are not super important, but I could see families all going in on a new diet plan together as a resolution. Might be a good feature to implement before New Years! Best of luck!
mrpopo 8y ago
I don't really like this. When I am cooking, I am not watching my calorie intake and sodium/cholesterol levels. I want to enjoy cooking with fresh, local, seasonal ingredients. No choice anywhere in the options to choose the region, the season, or base ingredients. This is just encouraging a supermarket-shopper lifestyle that needs to disappear ASAP (imported agriculture/greenhouse produce growing is amongst the worst climate offenders).

alwaysreading 8y ago

My family really enjoys the recipes in Magnolia Table by Joanna Gaines (Fixer Upper) - https://amzn.to/2S1vQvI https://amzn.to/2S1vQvI

crispyambulance 8y ago

Well I don't know what you mean by "complete". That is very culture dependent. But I think you'll want to explore cookbooks with two different approaches. I got 2 recommendations... * Opinionated -- "The Art of Simple Food" by Alice Waters. This is a comprehensive cookbook covering many different recipes with words on technique and lots of background about the ingredients and how to use them effectively. It doesn't make assumptions or gloss over stuff. * Ingredient-focused -- "Market Cooking" by David Tanis. This focuses on recipes using ingredients that one finds in farmer's markets. I like this approach because it is a smart idea to start with what is good/fresh and available in your location first, and then find recipes for it, than the other way around. Both of these will give some guidance about what goes with what in terms of flavor and ingredients.

swish_bob 8y ago

I'm quite fond of Gordon Ramsay's "Sunday Lunch". It's essentially a series of 3 course meals. One of the nice things is that it's laid out with instructions that assume you're doing the entire meal, so it has a section on what to do the day before, 4 hours before serving, 1 hour before, etc. It helps quite a lot if you haven't a lot of experience managing the timings of several dishes to arrive at the same time. Something I used to struggle with when I first started cooking.

diegs 8y ago

https://www.cooksmarts.com/ https://www.cooksmarts.com/ is amazing. 4 complete meals per week, can tweak serving sizes and dietary constraints, takes seasonality of vegetables into account, strives to have overlapping ingredients, tells you what you can prep ahead of time, great video guides to fill gaps in your techniques, and the food is generally fast to prepare and quite tasty. You can also easily search the back catalog of recipes if you don't fancy the current week's meal plan.

eoinof 8y ago

The Family Meal is a good place to start. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11955187-the-family-meal https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11955187-the-family-meal Good mix of base sauces & 3 course meals..

tootie 8y ago

How to Cook Everything is the one cookbook you should own. It walks through all the basic cooking techniques for every type of food. Including how to select, prep and store. What kinds of foods can be cooked the same ways. It's like a home cooking textbook.

acomjean 8y ago

platejoy? Well its not technically a cookbook, but... Its a y combinator company and does meal planning online. If you have some diet restrictions its useful. I does seem to grocery list/ knows what you should have in stock (digital pantry based on your shopping list). We've been using it a couple years now (after dealing with the overflowing vegetables from a CSA) and its been good. Lost a little weight too. [1]https://www.platejoy.com/ https://www.platejoy.com/

peterwwillis 8y ago

Go to MapCrunch, click "Go", copy location into Google Maps, look for "restaurants", pick a restaurant, look for menu, select an entree that looks good, and put it together. I got Perth, Australia, found a restaurant, found the menu, and found this entree: "Chicken Breast filled with Camembert Cheese & Spinach. Served with Mediterranean Vegetables, Pear potatoes, Broccolini & Sun-Dried Tomato Coulis".