Recipe Curator

Client: Chris Roberts <chris.roberts@cambridgeconsultants.com> Cambridge Consultants

One area of my life that could do with the addition of a bit of technology is recipe curation. I have a shelf full of cookery books, a few websites that I like, and I occasionally get given recipes by other people. I also have a veg box delivery with unpredictable contents, a desire to eat seasonal ingredients and try new recipes, a variable availability of cooking time, two daughters with a only partially overlapping Venn diagram of food fussiness and not a poor memory. What I'd like is some sort of database of recipes to which I can send queries such as "Find me something that doesn't contain cabbage or tomatoes that takes less than 30 minutes to prepare" or "I've got kohlrabi in the veg box AGAIN, are there any recipes I haven't tried that might make something edible out of it?" or "I've actually got a couple of hours free to cook this weekend, what was that complicated Ottolenghi recipe I flagged two weeks ago to try later?" The database needs to cope with the fact that ingredients can have different names but mean the same thing: e.g "flour" and "plain flour", and that "1/4 lb" and "4oz" are the same thing and equal to "100g" (and not 113g). It would be great if once I've chosen this week's menu, it could produce a shopping list I can plug into www.<my_favourite_supermarket>.com, and it needs to have a high WAF, i.e. be usable by non-engineers.