CaptainCook's Misguided Adventures

Why I built a recipe website

This past year I built a meal planning and recipe box website. The tech stack is very basic: I format recipes I find online into a standardized markdown note format in VS Code. These notes are stored in a GitHub repository that resides within my Obsidian vault. This lets me access my notes and edit them on the go (more easily than other methods). After building an index page and internal links, I use GitHub's Pages feature to publish this to a website that I can access easily from anywhere and see our meals for the week and the associated recipes.

I've started throwing other scraps of information related to food there as well. I'm slowly adding our family's favorite cocktail and baking recipes. The formatting is basic, but this system has saved me from looking for things in 5 places. It also helps me focus on what we're cooking this week.

There are a few reasons why I ended up here.

  1. A desire to move to a more open format. I've slowly pushed my notes and other writings out of specific formats (Google Docs, Word, and iOS notes) and into more open formats. Scott Nesbitt's Plain Text Project blog inspired me to leverage plain text and markdown and spend less time organizing things in Google Drive and playing with sharing permissions. Exporting my cocktail recipes from Google Keep affirmed by decision to move to an open format. (It was much harder than I should have been!)
  2. Making life easier. Meal planning has been a lifesaver for our family. Organizing our meals for the week helps us shop more efficiently and know what we need and how much of it. Keeping recipes in simple format makes cooking simpler because I'm not fighting with videos and ads appearing mid recipe and shifting the position of the webpage. Keeping all of our past recipes some where accessible helps inspire us for the next weeks meal plan as well.
  3. Building things is fun. Building a website feels great. Even if it's just for me, I still find it amazing that I can build and host a website for free!

In the next year, I'm exploring adding a search bar and expanding my cocktail notes.

Go build something! If I can do it anyone can!