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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

#81
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…

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.

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

#82
post #78

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)

fix a small monitor in your kitchen and add leap motion controller (https://www.leapmotion.com/where-to-buy/us/)

I have not tried it but it should solve your problem

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

#83
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…

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.

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

#84
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.

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

#85
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…

A quick look makes it seem like the website is mostly just a stripped down version of Yummly, what sets it apart?

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

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

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

I'm amazed nobody's mentioned BBC Good Food yet, literally the only recipe site I use.

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

#87
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 nutriti…

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?

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

#89
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…

I've done this as well using scraped recipes from a website that conveniently labeled all ingredients with data tags for their referral program.

Although my goal was to find recipes that shared ingredients to cut back on wastage. I used a constraint solver (https://developers.google.com/optimization) and asked it to produce 5 recipes requiring the minimum number of ingredients, and was rather amused that the first run included such classics as "boiled egg", "butter potato" and "toast".

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