My wife is a good cook. I am not. However since retirement I have been acquiring new adult skills in cleaning, washing, ironing, shopping and cooking. I may yet go into the garden.
However, it wouldn’t be fun unless I could find a technical angle and so for cooking I have been playing with mealie. To date I have eaten several of my experiments.
One of the best, and simplest, ways to use mealie is to find an online recipe and get mealie to scrape the site. I have trialed a few online resources and Nagi Maehashi’s recipetineats has worked the best so far requiring minimal post scrape formatting.
One of mealie’s best features is the ability to create a specific shopping list from the ingredients list. Tick off what you’ve got in the pantry and it’s off to Coles to get the rest.
The mealie page for the recipe has a “Cook Mode” option. This prevents the laptop screen from going to sleep and displays just the ingredients and instructions. The page also has a link to the original URL. This is useful for understanding the thinking behind the recipe and more particularly for seeing the three minute video that accompanies all Nagi’s recipes.
I acknowledge the help of my wife in holding my hand through the simplest of the basics and supervising my shopping. (Who knew there were four Asian food shops in Capalaba!)
I found the shopping the least inefficient part of the whole process. The ultimate goal would be to automate it. I have a vision of clicking on a recipe and two hours later all the ingredients turning up at the front door.
That may yet be just a fever dream. I blame @matthew919 for sending me down a Grocy rabbit hole.
It looks like it’s going to take three hours just to scan what’s in the pantry.
Oh, I really wish you hadn’t shown me that. Many years ago, I looked at building something that incorporated a barcode scanner (either USB or keyboard wedge) and took the UPC barcodes off items to track what I had and what I’d used with the intent of feeding it into a mobile shopping list. I could also have some rudimentary tracking of pricing and specials, etc. that way too. Scan the item in when unpacking groceries and scan the item out when using it.
Looks like Grocy and its addons (e.g., barcodebuddy) do all that and more… I fear I’m also going to end up down this rabbit hole over the coming months.
Man, @matthew919 has made two big splashes this month! n8n and Grocy. My list just keeps getting bigger
Very excited to see another Nagi fan @zeeclor . We’ve got both of her books, and have been on her blog for years. All of her recipes are very rewarding. Other cookbooks are a bit hot and miss (when combined with my capabilities), but her recipes always come out well and I want to try another one.
Loving this guys!
Been tinkering with mealie as well now, imported a bunch of recipes from Aaron and Claire, a Korean channel which I have been following for many years which imported almost perfectly.
Still planning how to setup with Grocy for barcode scanning (As @Belfry mentioned). There is also a “chore” list and battery list which I plan on using with the smart devices i have around the house running on battery. I definitely like the look of mealie more, but love the functionality of Grocy. I believe the end result will be utilising n8n as @jdownie mentioned!
And yet another reminder I need to look into recipetin eats! keep forgetting…
Note @zeeclor you can make “cook books” (essentially group recipes) in Mealie, it’s how I plan on separating a number of areas where I gather recipes. I forgot how but seems like there is a hidden area in Mealie where you can add categories and other attributes to recipes, I just bulk assigned a category and a cook book can have the criteria of (for example) that category.
I’m using Obsidian for my recipes, and I’m ashamed to say… Alexa for my groceries. It’s high on my wish list to get voice assistant integration with anything other than the vendor supplied solution. With IFTTT, I used to be able to put our groceries into RTM, and I have never been more whole!
I’ve got high hopes that this turns into something that (with n8n) might complement Grocy (or just RTM) with voice commands.
