Transforming recipe websites
I live alone and work from home. I eat a cooked meal twice a day. I’m not someone with a natural culinary imagination, so I often rely on recipes sites. I usually spend an hour trawling through BBC food sites, or the online destinations of celebrity chefs. It gets boring, which is a shame, as I like to cook and I love food.
How has the web not solved this problem yet? The sites that allow you to input what you’ve got in your cupboard, and then offer you suggestions based on that, are ok - but you’re still sifting through recipe after recipe, most of American origin (which means trying to figure out what the hell cilantro is).
Here’s what I want.
The site offers you options:
1. How many people are you cooking for? (Few sites offer recipes for one).
2. What’s your budget? (One main problem with recipes is that the more interesting ones rely on you buying exotic ingredients that you never use again - why can’t more sites take this into account, and offer you further suggestions the following day for meals with the same ingredients?)
3. How much time have you got? (I don’t always want “quick and simple” - at the weekends I’d like to experiment).
And then give me suggestions, broken down into sections based on main ingredients (chicken, fish, etc). Give me the option to click an “I cooked this” button so it can personalise the experience, give me a whizzy profile I feel good about updating and sharing, do some Last.fm-y stuff in the background to offer me similar recipes, and - crucially - do all this in a way that means I don’t have to spend more than 5 minutes at a time using it.
Eventually it can just throw a recipe at me in my Twitter feed every lunchtime and dinnertime, that I know I can make, will like, and have the ingredients for.
Not too difficult surely? :)
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