15 ms·

Show HN: I had issues organizing my favorite recipes, so I built this

422 points by x86mitch 7y ago

x86mitch 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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/
- mattmar96 7y ago
  Thanks for building this. Funny enough I had a very similar idea last night :) Currently just store recipes in my notes app but its less than ideal
  - x86mitch 7y ago
    Adding recipes into my notebook was the origin of this site. I would write out the ingredients and then look up the nutrition content for each one. So the purpose of feastgenius is to automate that :)
- bhargav 7y ago
  The website looks great, love the design and categories. > "Clip" recipes from anywhere on the web. I always wondered if recipes would be, like most content, copyrighted. Have you looked into this? Also, did you try using pen and paper? This sounds silly but when I am fasting, I am get cranky. Writing it down helped me stay focused and not give my self yet another excuse to break the fast. Edit: Formatting.
  - x86mitch 7y ago
    you are absolutely correct, the instructions for a recipe can be copyrighted. If you use the app you'll notice that when a recipe is clipped, in order to see the instructions you will get directed to the original recipe. I want to do right by creators and make sure they get the full credit deserved. What the app is concerned with is the ingredients(which is not copyrighted). I can use that for calculating the nutritional content.
    - mosselman 7y ago
      Is there a library you use for the clipping, or do you have to write a custom piece of code for each site you can clip from?
- BozeWolf 7y ago
  Cool! Will check it out and see if it defeats my own system. Also great you started cooking yourself. It is a great way to relax and be creative. Hard work pays off afterwards:) Ill write down my way of working, hopefully it inspires you. My current system is: when i have found and tested a good recipe, i copy/paste it into an email and email to myself, with a headline prefixed with “recipe”, for example “recipe: soto ayam”. Copy pasting recipes is important, as websites blog posts disappear quite often. Email is always with me, gmail has a very good search engine. Content is free form. Usually i can just copy/paste (missing) ingredients into the google keep list i share, for groceries, with my better half. Additionally i can share recipes with her by mailing them, although sharing links would be more convenient. Will try it out later this week when i probably come up with a never before tried recipe.
- eps 7y ago
  Some feedback - Clicked on a random soup recipe, it gave a photo, the ingredient list, but for the instructions it wanted me to go to some other site. This is inconvenient and it also carries a real rick of losing the recipe if the external link 404-s (see the LuckyPeach fiasco, for example). I realize there might be some copyright issues, but for me, as a user, they don't exist when I copy recipes to my own private collection, so I would expect any online version of it to behave the same way. It needs to keep full versions of every recipe and an optional "source" link. I'm not interested in calorie counting as a central feature, so the way the site functions right now is not dramatically better than just keeping a plain bookmark list. EDIT - I can formalize my main gripe now. Above, you describe the site as a way to _organize my recipes_, where in reality it's more of community _index_ of recipe _links_ with some diet-oriented extras. That's the main issue. It doesn't actually do well what you describe at the top, but it does well some other thing that's mentioned at the bottom.
- starky 7y ago
  A quick look makes it seem like the website is mostly just a stripped down version of Yummly, what sets it apart?
preya2k 7y ago
Did you use any UI or CSS framework for this look?
- joshmn 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    ️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.
navs 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
crummy 7y ago
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/
- uberduber 7y ago
  I use Paprika as well. The most useful feature is that I can add a bunch of recipes to the calendar for a week, and then auto generate a grocery list synced to my phone. You can also easily scale the ingredients. I have a couple of friends who use it and say it clips recipes in foreign languages pretty well (but no ingredient scaling). There have been a lot of apps in this space which were better but also subsequently abandoned by the developers. Almost all of my friends switched over to Paprika because they got tired of switching again and again.
- x86mitch 7y ago
  I have not used paprika myself so unfortunately I cannot comment. But if there are any features that you would like me to focus on for the next updates of feastgenius let me know and I will work them in.
  - Moru 7y ago
    I think the biggest feature for most people is that they don't want it to dissapear after 10 years. Many people put a lot of work into their recipe collection and wants it to be available for the kids when they grow up.
- kt103099 7y ago
  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.
  - 7y ago
swsieber 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 :)
jv22222 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Sounds like the app I'm building now. :)
  - x86mitch 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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/schema_org_subsets.html http://webdatacommons.org/structureddata/2018-12/stats/schem...
swalsh 7y ago
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.
- x86mitch 7y ago
  This sounds like something I would use if it were public. It would be awesome If I could swap recipes from the plan. For example, if I didn't feel like having stir fry I could swap it out for a meal with similar points.
  - swalsh 7y ago
    I've thought about making it public, but it's highly optimized for me... also therea no gui. It's just a command line app in python. I could make it open source though. It would be neat to see how other people modify it.
    - swsieber 7y ago
      I would love to see it even if only to see how that algorithm works.
    - x86mitch 7y ago
      Would love to see it. Please reach out to me if you do open source it.
    - 7y ago
benawad 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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-chicken-legs-ieb6yd https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/everything-nice-jerk-chi....
  - benawad 7y ago
    I didn't find any good open source options
- Fuzzwah 7y ago
  I couldn't find any info on how much saffron costs to use?
  - 7y ago
dddddaviddddd 7y ago
I'm frequently frustrated at how unoptimized meal planning and preparation is. Glad to see work in this space.
cproctor 7y ago
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 7y ago
  (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 7y ago
    Cook's illustrated/ATK as well, if you have a subscription. The quality is superb.
    - Sean1708 7y ago
      I'm amazed nobody's mentioned BBC Good Food yet, literally the only recipe site I use.
      - mikojan 7y ago
        It is really that good.
    - 7y ago
jonas21 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
mtlynch 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 :)
SpyKiIIer 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    Thanks for the great reply! Question: Answered!
bpye 7y ago
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.
- bschwindHN 7y ago
  Speaking as an American, US measurements drive me crazy, especially in baking where packing density can throw things off. I have a coffee scale that is accurate to 0.1 grams and it makes it _so_ much easier to measure everything out. Having a sliding scale for the number of people you intend to serve would also boost the usability of the site.
- enobrev 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
hardwaresofton 7y ago
https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/javascript-alert-quot-xss-quot-cjagaq https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/javascript-alert-quot-xs... You might want to add/move up reporting to the feature list -- this recipe is currently on the front page.
jbillow2000 7y ago
This is interesting but I just use my bookmark manager Bookmark OS for organizing recipes https://bookmarkos.com https://bookmarkos.com
tmaly 7y ago
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.
optymizer 7y ago
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
khope 7y ago
https://share.cloutbucks.com/Khope https://share.cloutbucks.com/Khope A way to make extra cash! I've made over 1,500$ so far in not even 3 weeks! Check it out!
jchallis 7y ago
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.
ako 7y ago
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/
- jonheller 7y ago
  Same here, it's met my needs pretty perfectly: Fast, good search, plenty of categorization options, absolutely excellent grocery store list integration with recipes, and bookmarklet to save recipes I find online.
- asdfgeoff 7y ago
  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.
servercobra 7y ago
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.
thesquib 7y ago
I use eatyourbooks.com
bpye 7y ago
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.
yoz-y 7y ago
Looks pretty neat. One thing that could be useful would be to able swap between metric/freedom units.
Kiro 7y ago
People hijacking the thread with their own program without even commenting on the submission. Nice.
boyka 7y ago
How do you obtain the macros? Via API to MyFitnessPal or a similar service? How do you make sure macros are accurate?
StapleHorse 7y ago
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 7y ago
  There's several sites like that. I've used Supercook
oliwarner 7y ago
This looks like a copyright nightmare.
- bjoli 7y ago
  I don't know exactly what you mean, but recipes cannot be copyrighted in many jurisdictions. Images are of course a different matter.
mnd999 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
- tspike 7y ago
  Get a laminator?
- ForFreedom 7y ago
  fix a small monitor in your kitchen and add leap motion controller (https://www.leapmotion.com/where-to-buy/us/ https://www.leapmotion.com/where-to-buy/us/) I have not tried it but it should solve your problem
- ghaff 7y ago
  I have a tablet in my kitchen but I tend to end up with paper because I can easily scrawl notes on it. Basically, I keep one binder with my go to recipes and then have a mostly disorganized pile of paper. Also keep recipe bookmarks on pinboard and post-its in various cookbooks. Aside from that master binder, it's all pretty disorganized but that tends to be how I work in general :-)
sleavey 7y ago
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.
conradfr 7y ago
I don't know how anyone can follow a recipe which use "cup" as a unit of measurement.
pknerd 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
rbreve 7y ago
Nice, What did you use to make it? backend/frontend?
randaouser 7y ago
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
paines 7y ago
FINALLY, a recipe site, which is not drowning in ads! How refreshing.
scottmcdot 7y ago
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.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  It's open to interpretation? Not that it's an ideal measuring system, but all those units should have unambiguous metric equivalents.
  - smt88 7y ago
    I believe the suggestion is that many recipes with metric measurements will use grams (measuring mass), while most American recipes use cups/tablespoons/etc. (measuring volume). I've noticed this and have no idea why it's the case.
- fredley 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
  - lunchables 7y ago
    It's really just a non-issue. Flour could be compressed, but its not really in reality. The minor differences really don't matter much. Of course you can also sift it, which will not only help if it was somehow really heavily compressed but also breaks up clumps.
cryptica 7y ago
"I had issues organizing my favorite recipes, so I built this". Sounds like BS. How many 'favorite' recipes can one person have such that they have trouble 'organizing' them? I think the title of this link should be "I wanted to raise money from investors so I built an app and came up with clickbait scratch-my-own-itch startup rhetoric to get attention on HN"
- smt88 7y ago
  Normally I'd say you're being too cynical, but in this case it really does look like little more than a recipes-only (social?) bookmarking service.
  - x86mitch 7y ago
    At its core that mostly what it is. The project forced me to get out of my comfort zone as a programmer. I picked up 2 new language/frameoworks (rails and angular), had to learn about building infrastructure on top of aws, deep dived into elasticsearch and then pollish everything enough to get it to a "showoff-able"(word?) state.
    - cushychicken 7y ago
      Everyone should learn to code, but not everyone should bother showing it off, apparently. /s
    - smt88 7y ago
      Cool! Good for you. I think the reactions you're getting are likely focusing on this project as a useful product or a business, not a coding exercise. Because it's well-trod territory, with existing products that have been around for years, you're probably seeing more negativity than you would have if we all knew this was a learning project. That said, not every step of every coder's learning process is broadly interesting to a community of people who have been programming for decades in some cases. Usually these kinds of posts are better received when they come as a blog post about what the person's background is, what they were trying to learn, and how they felt about using those tools for the first time.
arcticf0x 7y ago
Did you try using google keep? Works really well for this kind of stuff ;)
solatic 7y ago
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-Destroyed-Alluring/dp/1449423450 https://www.amazon.com/Tomatoland-Industrial-Agriculture-Des...
- apacheCamel 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    A reverse cookbook app, I have these ingredients, what can I make?
m-p-3 7y ago
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.
johnnyRose 7y ago
Nice tool, I'd love to try it. Is your sign-up broken? It just comes back with an empty red alert.
chooseaname 7y ago
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.
casper313 7y ago
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.
gpickett00 7y ago
I would use this if you had a category/filter for plant based recipes.
tarp 7y ago
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
JohnFen 7y ago
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).
ahaferburg 7y ago
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.
mike_heffner 7y ago
Very cool, a similar site I use is: https://onetsp.com https://onetsp.com.
hopesthoughts 7y ago
Thanks for this! I could really use it.

422 points by x86mitch 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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/
mattmar96 7y ago
Thanks for building this. Funny enough I had a very similar idea last night :) Currently just store recipes in my notes app but its less than ideal
- x86mitch 7y ago
  Adding recipes into my notebook was the origin of this site. I would write out the ingredients and then look up the nutrition content for each one. So the purpose of feastgenius is to automate that :)
bhargav 7y ago
The website looks great, love the design and categories. > "Clip" recipes from anywhere on the web. I always wondered if recipes would be, like most content, copyrighted. Have you looked into this? Also, did you try using pen and paper? This sounds silly but when I am fasting, I am get cranky. Writing it down helped me stay focused and not give my self yet another excuse to break the fast. Edit: Formatting.
- x86mitch 7y ago
  you are absolutely correct, the instructions for a recipe can be copyrighted. If you use the app you'll notice that when a recipe is clipped, in order to see the instructions you will get directed to the original recipe. I want to do right by creators and make sure they get the full credit deserved. What the app is concerned with is the ingredients(which is not copyrighted). I can use that for calculating the nutritional content.
  - mosselman 7y ago
    Is there a library you use for the clipping, or do you have to write a custom piece of code for each site you can clip from?
BozeWolf 7y ago
Cool! Will check it out and see if it defeats my own system. Also great you started cooking yourself. It is a great way to relax and be creative. Hard work pays off afterwards:) Ill write down my way of working, hopefully it inspires you. My current system is: when i have found and tested a good recipe, i copy/paste it into an email and email to myself, with a headline prefixed with “recipe”, for example “recipe: soto ayam”. Copy pasting recipes is important, as websites blog posts disappear quite often. Email is always with me, gmail has a very good search engine. Content is free form. Usually i can just copy/paste (missing) ingredients into the google keep list i share, for groceries, with my better half. Additionally i can share recipes with her by mailing them, although sharing links would be more convenient. Will try it out later this week when i probably come up with a never before tried recipe.
eps 7y ago
Some feedback - Clicked on a random soup recipe, it gave a photo, the ingredient list, but for the instructions it wanted me to go to some other site. This is inconvenient and it also carries a real rick of losing the recipe if the external link 404-s (see the LuckyPeach fiasco, for example). I realize there might be some copyright issues, but for me, as a user, they don't exist when I copy recipes to my own private collection, so I would expect any online version of it to behave the same way. It needs to keep full versions of every recipe and an optional "source" link. I'm not interested in calorie counting as a central feature, so the way the site functions right now is not dramatically better than just keeping a plain bookmark list. EDIT - I can formalize my main gripe now. Above, you describe the site as a way to _organize my recipes_, where in reality it's more of community _index_ of recipe _links_ with some diet-oriented extras. That's the main issue. It doesn't actually do well what you describe at the top, but it does well some other thing that's mentioned at the bottom.
starky 7y ago
A quick look makes it seem like the website is mostly just a stripped down version of Yummly, what sets it apart?

preya2k 7y ago

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

joshmn 7y ago
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 7y ago
  ️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.

navs 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

crummy 7y ago

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/

uberduber 7y ago
I use Paprika as well. The most useful feature is that I can add a bunch of recipes to the calendar for a week, and then auto generate a grocery list synced to my phone. You can also easily scale the ingredients. I have a couple of friends who use it and say it clips recipes in foreign languages pretty well (but no ingredient scaling). There have been a lot of apps in this space which were better but also subsequently abandoned by the developers. Almost all of my friends switched over to Paprika because they got tired of switching again and again.
x86mitch 7y ago
I have not used paprika myself so unfortunately I cannot comment. But if there are any features that you would like me to focus on for the next updates of feastgenius let me know and I will work them in.
- Moru 7y ago
  I think the biggest feature for most people is that they don't want it to dissapear after 10 years. Many people put a lot of work into their recipe collection and wants it to be available for the kids when they grow up.
kt103099 7y ago
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.
- 7y ago

swsieber 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 :)

jv22222 7y ago

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 7y ago
Sounds like the app I'm building now. :)
- x86mitch 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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/schema_org_subsets.html http://webdatacommons.org/structureddata/2018-12/stats/schem...

swalsh 7y ago

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.

x86mitch 7y ago
This sounds like something I would use if it were public. It would be awesome If I could swap recipes from the plan. For example, if I didn't feel like having stir fry I could swap it out for a meal with similar points.
- swalsh 7y ago
  I've thought about making it public, but it's highly optimized for me... also therea no gui. It's just a command line app in python. I could make it open source though. It would be neat to see how other people modify it.
  - swsieber 7y ago
    I would love to see it even if only to see how that algorithm works.
  - x86mitch 7y ago
    Would love to see it. Please reach out to me if you do open source it.
  - 7y ago

benawad 7y ago

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 7y ago
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-chicken-legs-ieb6yd https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/everything-nice-jerk-chi....
- benawad 7y ago
  I didn't find any good open source options
Fuzzwah 7y ago
I couldn't find any info on how much saffron costs to use?
- 7y ago

dddddaviddddd 7y ago

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

cproctor 7y ago

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 7y ago
(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 7y ago
  Cook's illustrated/ATK as well, if you have a subscription. The quality is superb.
  - Sean1708 7y ago
    I'm amazed nobody's mentioned BBC Good Food yet, literally the only recipe site I use.
    - mikojan 7y ago
      It is really that good.
  - 7y ago

jonas21 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

mtlynch 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 :)

SpyKiIIer 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Thanks for the great reply! Question: Answered!

bpye 7y ago

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.

bschwindHN 7y ago
Speaking as an American, US measurements drive me crazy, especially in baking where packing density can throw things off. I have a coffee scale that is accurate to 0.1 grams and it makes it _so_ much easier to measure everything out. Having a sliding scale for the number of people you intend to serve would also boost the usability of the site.
enobrev 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.

hardwaresofton 7y ago

https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/javascript-alert-quot-xss-quot-cjagaq https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/javascript-alert-quot-xs... You might want to add/move up reporting to the feature list -- this recipe is currently on the front page.

jbillow2000 7y ago

This is interesting but I just use my bookmark manager Bookmark OS for organizing recipes https://bookmarkos.com https://bookmarkos.com

tmaly 7y ago

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.

optymizer 7y ago

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

khope 7y ago

https://share.cloutbucks.com/Khope https://share.cloutbucks.com/Khope A way to make extra cash! I've made over 1,500$ so far in not even 3 weeks! Check it out!

jchallis 7y ago

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.

ako 7y ago

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/

jonheller 7y ago
Same here, it's met my needs pretty perfectly: Fast, good search, plenty of categorization options, absolutely excellent grocery store list integration with recipes, and bookmarklet to save recipes I find online.
asdfgeoff 7y ago
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.

servercobra 7y ago

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.

thesquib 7y ago

I use eatyourbooks.com

bpye 7y ago

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.

yoz-y 7y ago

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

Kiro 7y ago

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

boyka 7y ago

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

StapleHorse 7y ago

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 7y ago
There's several sites like that. I've used Supercook

oliwarner 7y ago

This looks like a copyright nightmare.

bjoli 7y ago
I don't know exactly what you mean, but recipes cannot be copyrighted in many jurisdictions. Images are of course a different matter.

mnd999 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
tspike 7y ago
Get a laminator?
ForFreedom 7y ago
fix a small monitor in your kitchen and add leap motion controller (https://www.leapmotion.com/where-to-buy/us/ https://www.leapmotion.com/where-to-buy/us/) I have not tried it but it should solve your problem
ghaff 7y ago
I have a tablet in my kitchen but I tend to end up with paper because I can easily scrawl notes on it. Basically, I keep one binder with my go to recipes and then have a mostly disorganized pile of paper. Also keep recipe bookmarks on pinboard and post-its in various cookbooks. Aside from that master binder, it's all pretty disorganized but that tends to be how I work in general :-)

sleavey 7y ago

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.

conradfr 7y ago

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

pknerd 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

rbreve 7y ago

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

randaouser 7y ago

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

paines 7y ago

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

scottmcdot 7y ago

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.

nerdponx 7y ago
It's open to interpretation? Not that it's an ideal measuring system, but all those units should have unambiguous metric equivalents.
- smt88 7y ago
  I believe the suggestion is that many recipes with metric measurements will use grams (measuring mass), while most American recipes use cups/tablespoons/etc. (measuring volume). I've noticed this and have no idea why it's the case.
fredley 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
- lunchables 7y ago
  It's really just a non-issue. Flour could be compressed, but its not really in reality. The minor differences really don't matter much. Of course you can also sift it, which will not only help if it was somehow really heavily compressed but also breaks up clumps.

cryptica 7y ago

"I had issues organizing my favorite recipes, so I built this". Sounds like BS. How many 'favorite' recipes can one person have such that they have trouble 'organizing' them? I think the title of this link should be "I wanted to raise money from investors so I built an app and came up with clickbait scratch-my-own-itch startup rhetoric to get attention on HN"

smt88 7y ago
Normally I'd say you're being too cynical, but in this case it really does look like little more than a recipes-only (social?) bookmarking service.
- x86mitch 7y ago
  At its core that mostly what it is. The project forced me to get out of my comfort zone as a programmer. I picked up 2 new language/frameoworks (rails and angular), had to learn about building infrastructure on top of aws, deep dived into elasticsearch and then pollish everything enough to get it to a "showoff-able"(word?) state.
  - cushychicken 7y ago
    Everyone should learn to code, but not everyone should bother showing it off, apparently. /s
  - smt88 7y ago
    Cool! Good for you. I think the reactions you're getting are likely focusing on this project as a useful product or a business, not a coding exercise. Because it's well-trod territory, with existing products that have been around for years, you're probably seeing more negativity than you would have if we all knew this was a learning project. That said, not every step of every coder's learning process is broadly interesting to a community of people who have been programming for decades in some cases. Usually these kinds of posts are better received when they come as a blog post about what the person's background is, what they were trying to learn, and how they felt about using those tools for the first time.

arcticf0x 7y ago

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

solatic 7y ago

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-Destroyed-Alluring/dp/1449423450 https://www.amazon.com/Tomatoland-Industrial-Agriculture-Des...

apacheCamel 7y ago
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 7y ago
  A reverse cookbook app, I have these ingredients, what can I make?

m-p-3 7y ago

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.

johnnyRose 7y ago

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

chooseaname 7y ago

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.

casper313 7y ago

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.

gpickett00 7y ago

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

tarp 7y ago

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

JohnFen 7y ago

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).

ahaferburg 7y ago

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.

mike_heffner 7y ago

Very cool, a similar site I use is: https://onetsp.com https://onetsp.com.

hopesthoughts 7y ago

Thanks for this! I could really use it.