I’ve wanted to add recipe ratings for a while now. When you have collected tens, or even hundreds, or recipes, it can be hard to quickly find your best. I didn’t want to just add a rating field to the recipe page though. If you have a giant collection of recipes, you need ratings the most. But then you’re least likely to run through every single one of them and assign a rating. Plus, I’m not convinced that how much you, or your family, enjoys a recipe is all that constant. Make your favorite meal enough times and that 5-star rating will start to seem like a mistake.
So, now after you’ve prepared a recipe (any time in the next week), you’ll be asked if it was any good. All of these simple ratings are collected, weighted by recency, and used to assign a star rating. If you have any thoughts or ideas, just let me know.
Mealfire now has an iPhone app. There are a million more features I could add, but I figured it was time to just get it out there. If you have an iPhone, you should give it a try. The price is right (free) and it really makes it easy to take your shopping list with you or view your recipes on the go.
I’m a bit crazy about trying to get through the grocery store as quickly as possible, and to that end I’ve added a new feature to Mealfire: stores. This lets you tell Mealfire how your favorite grocery stores are laid out so that when you create a shopping list for that store, the items are in the right order. Here’s what the Albertson’s near my house looks like in Mealfire:
Now, when I create a shopping list to use at this store everything is ordered so that I start at one end of the store and am finished shopping by the time I get to the other end.
I like to print out my recipes to work off (and destroy) while I cook them. I’m a pretty messy cook, so I really don’t want my laptop anywhere near the kitchen while I’m throwing flour and sauces all over the place. However, I’ve heard lately that not everyone works that way. And for those people who dare to bring their laptop (or iPad?) into the kitchen with them: I give you, Cook’s View:
It’s a very simple page. It just lets you stack up as many recipes as you like, side by side, using all the space available in the browser. To use it, just view any recipe in your collection, then click on the “More Options” button at the top right of the screen and select “add to cook’s view”. To add more recipes, click “Add Recipe” at the top left. Happy cooking!
Let me start by saying that this topic has been done to death. But I still think there’s a lot more to say about these two phones. I’m just going to gloss over the obvious, however, to avoid re-writing what has already by discussed to death.
Android and the Nexus One have a lot of little things going for them. Out of laziness, I’m going to skip all the obvious things that other people have already covered in detail, like multi-tasking, screen size and resolution, battery life, turn-by-turn directions, voice recognition, removable battery and Google apps integration.
I recently imported a nice cookie recipe into Mealfire. Here’s how the ingredients look on AllRecipes:
- 3/4 cup butter, softened
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar
- 3/4 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 2 1/4 cups plus 2 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 3/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 1/2 (12-oz.) packages semisweet chocolate morsels
- Parchment paper
and here’s how it looked after being imported:
- ¾ cp butter, softened
- ¾ cp granulated sugar
- ¾ cp firmly packed dark brown sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 1½ tsp vanilla extract
- 2⅓ cp and 2 tsp all-purpose flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- ¾ tsp salt
- 1½ (12-oz.) packages semisweet chocolate morsels
- Parchment paper
There’s not a lot of difference there. The units have been abbreviated and the fractions have been turned into HTML, but that’s all just style. The interesting difference is with the flour. There, “2 1/4 cups plus 2 Tbsp.” has been turned into “2⅓ cp and 2 tsp”. I would argue that the Mealfire representation is a bit better. They are both 325.30 milliliters, but the second one gets a lot closer with the first part, meaning that if you wanted to skip out on that second measure (or just forgot), you’d only be off by about 3%, rather than 10%.
But there’s another benefit to programatically recognizing split measurements. Say I wanted to now halve that recipe. If I don’t split measurements into two parts, I get something like this for the first three ingredients:
- ⅜ cp butter, softened
- ⅜ cp granulated sugar
- ⅜ cp firmly packed dark brown sugar
That’s not terribly easy to measure. Actually, it’s really tough. You have to think to yourself, “Well, that’s an eighth less than a half, so I’ll measure a half, then take off a smidge…”. If you split it, however, you get this:
- ⅓ cp and 2 tsp butter, softened
- ⅓ cp and 2 tsp granulated sugar
- ⅓ cp and 2 tsp firmly packed dark brown sugar
Here’s another nice example. Consider the following ingredient:
⅓ cp flour
What happens if you want to halve that? 1/6 of a cup is not going to be all that useful, of course. Here’s what Mealfire gives you:
2 Tbsp and 2 tsp flour
There’s a couple things going on here. First, anything less than 1/4 cup should be represented in tablespoons or teaspoons, so the unit has changed, but it hasn’t changed into 2 2/3 tablespoons, which is perfectly correct. It turns out that you can’t ever have a third of a tablespoon. A third of a tablespoon is a teaspoon, but not everyone knows that. So, instead of confusing people who can’t find the “1/3 tablespoon” on their measuring spoon set, you spell out for them exactly how to get there.
None of these examples are major roadblocks, but not having to do math while your cooking let’s you concentrate more on not burning dinner. I tend to need all the help there that I can get.