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

feastgenius.com

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

#31

Post by kt103099 »

crummy wrote: post #8

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/

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.

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

#32

Post by x86mitch »

benawad wrote: post #28

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 li…

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

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

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

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

#33

Post by koolba »

swalsh wrote: post #15

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…

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

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

#34

Post by fouc »

koolba wrote: post #33
swalsh wrote: post #15

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…

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

You can feed a family of 4 on $60/week in the USA. Especially if you buy staples and raw ingredients and cook everything from scratch.

Rice, flour, beans, lentils, etc should be the bulk of your staples. They are also dirt cheap. Remainder of the money can be used on fresh vegetables.

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

#35

Post by swalsh »

koolba wrote: post #33
swalsh wrote: post #15

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…

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

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

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

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

#36

Post by LeonB »

karanbhangui wrote: post #30
swalsh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agree with the others, please consider making this open source. Would love to use and contribute to it!

Maybe find some people from this list that you can try to present with a private alpha version - no polish no bells and whistles - less than an mvp. See what happens from there.

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

#37

Post by mattmar96 »

x86mitch wrote: post #2

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 someth…

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

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

#38

Post by bhargav »

x86mitch wrote: post #2

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 someth…

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.

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

#39

Post by x86mitch »

mattmar96 wrote: post #37
x86mitch wrote: post #2

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 someth…

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

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 :)
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