Show HN: Generate 'Cooking For Engineers' style recipe cards

Show HN: Generate 'Cooking For Engineers' style recipe cards(gobsmacked.io)

7 points by ekglimmer 320 days ago | 6 comments

Hi HN,

I have been working on a project which can automatically convert a recipe to the tree/graph/tabular style notation that pops up on HN every now and then. It's still early days but I am keen to hear about improvements I can make to the recipe presentation.

For reference, the earliest example I have seen of this style of notation is from 'Cooking For Engineers' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30797907) but I have seen other, similar notations from time to time.

This is my take on the notation, as well as the ability to convert recipes automatically. In the future, I would like to see it become my own personal kitchen/recipe management system but I would first like to improve the recipe display options.

It uses GPT-4o to format the recipe into a JSON tree structure, which is then rendered with CSS grid. So far it works well enough but there is definitely some recipes that are impossible to render, and of course GPT-4o will occasionally spit out less-than-useful trees. I have been using AppWrite for the backend.

Curious to hear everyone's thoughts and what people might like to see!

sudhirb 319 days ago |

I really like the design of this!

This is perhaps a bit more of a philosophical point but I think that I find the separation of quantity and ingredient perhaps a little arbitrary - in many cases they're coupled tightly e.g. I've only ever found 'cloves' as a quantity to refer to garlic.

I've personally always wanted recipes to be prefixed with a mise en place section of steps - e.g. instruct the reader explicitly to dice onions, etc. in the main body of the recipe rather than imply the step in the ingredient description - what do you reckon?

ekglimmer 319 days ago | |

I agree wholeheartedly - in fact the css class I actually use for the 'notes' column is MEP, for mise en place. That was the original intent for that column but it has become something of a catch all over time. I wonder if a mise en place component at the top of the recipe, in a separate grid, would be useful?

CaptainJack 320 days ago |

That's great, I really like it. My main thought is that most of non-american engineers favor SI units, so getting values in cups, ounces and pounds is not too great.

A possible improvement would be to replace freedom units with their international counterpart (with sane rounding to a two digits precision, or similar).

ekglimmer 320 days ago | |

Thank you! I agree completely. Right now it just uses the units in the original recipe, but being able to toggle between the two is definitely something I would like to do.

ndgold 320 days ago |

I love this thing for process view. Can you share the code so I can fork and build for our academic groups who need help with processes?

ekglimmer 320 days ago | |

Would be happy to discuss! Shoot me an email so I can understand a bit more, email can be found on my site in my bio or on gobsmacked!