For years I have tried meal planning and never found a good way to do it, for SO MANY reasons (I'm still working on it).
One of the main ones though is that I have recipes ALL over the place. Pinterest (from the old days), eBooks, screenshots of social media posts, recipe books (remember those? 📚) and Notes on my phone with combinations of ingredients I think might go well together 😕
There are SO MANY apps that manage recipes but I haven't found any yet that do ALL the main things I'm interested in personally (in fairness I have not yet searched that hard so if you know of one, please let me know!):
- Add recipes from all of the resources (most let you do this ✅)
- Interwebs (the vast majority do this and some let you import them which is cool)
- Offline places (not all let you do this)
- Search easily by ingredient or title
- Don't pollute my feed/view with a bunch of recipes I'm not interested in
- Allow me to rate recipes for myself (taste and ease of cooking)
- Allow others to rate recipes (this for me is critical in a shared household)
- Allow me to add a bunch on notes on alterations I made/thoughts/etc
I have used a spreadsheet in the past but I really haven't enjoyed the experience 🤷♀️
I don't feel like I want to build this out as an app just yet.
I'd rather collect some recommendations from people, investigate what already exists in this super saturated market and there are many other apps I want to be spending my time instead!
But in the meantime, I plan to use github issues because:
- I spend a lot of my days on github and the onus to switch tools is considerable
- It's way more interactive than a spreadsheet and allows me to hash out what I actually want from a tool within the comments of issues
For now my intention is to:
- Open an issue for a recipe as I make it (I don't want this to become a recipe graveyard for things I'll never try)
- Include in the recipe:
- Ingredients (so that these are searchable)
- Hashtags #mains #sides #breakfasts #vegan #makeahead etc (to be better defined and solidied in this readme)
- Any alterations I propose off the bat
- Suggestions (if I have any) for accompaniments and for other meals that can be effectively made in the same meal prep batch
- Once made:
- Add a score for taste and one for ease of making
- Get anyone eating that meal to do the same
- Close issues with dishes I didn't like/don't want to make again (these remain searchable)