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by milomildus 1687 days ago
Hi HN

I wanted to be able to search recipes from sources I knew I could trust. I also wanted a way to sort recipes by rating and include and exclude ingredients I already had.

Going forward, I aim to add more sources, better ingredient filtering (hierarchical) and more dimensions (cuisine, meal time, etc.)

Let me know what you think! One thing I struggled with was whether to includes mode with pictures or not. I can’t decide if the loss in info density is worth the benefit.

6 comments

Love the fast interface. It would be awesome if you could add functionality to filter by diet (vegetarian, vegan, paleo, etc.) For many people, diet determines which recipes are useful more often than any other factor.
I spent a couple of minutes trying to turn it into a usable vegetarian recipe filter by selecting every exclude that was meat related. An overflow auto on the excludes ingredients list would help avoid it spilling over into the results. Not sure why: Quick-Broiled Pork Chops With Peanuts and Gochujang

Almond and Dried Fruit Pilaf With Rotisserie Chicken

Freestyle Roasted Chicken Parm

etc. Still show up even with chicken, pork and 150+ other meat terms in the exclude list. But overall it's much improved.

Unfortunately can't find a way to bookmark the exclude list without a JS injection, and the source is obfuscated, so I'm probably not gonna bother figuring out how to do that.

... hm. I see that it does send out a promising looking API request that could be possibly turned into something bookmarkable. Looks like it has a handy array name too.

https://pastebin.com/nddrvGcy <= a start at meat filtering

I love the speed! I agree with other comments about the pictures. They help to skim so I think they add to information density in a way.

I would remove the author column personally, and maybe you could remove " reviews" in the reviews column (just show the number) and show the time as a number in minutes? If no time provided just show nothing.

If you add pictures you could have the option to show as a grid, similar to a file explorer. In the list view you could have a small picture with a bigger one when you hover?

I found it kinda cool to read the names, but with most, I couldn't even imagine what it is. May be showing images is a good idea. For mobile, I would leave it like now, but add a possibility to scroll within each result by tap & drag to see the images

(A few links showed 404 btw)

Nice work!

I'm curious how you're parsing ingredients. I built a keto recipe search tool a few years ago[0], and I got so into the ingredient parsing problem that I spun that off into a separate service.[1] I still maintain the open source version, if you're interested in using that for stovetop.[2]

[0] https://ketohub.io/

[1] https://zestfuldata.com/

[2] https://github.com/mtlynch/ingredient-phrase-tagger

Thank you for sharing your project.

I like the minimal design.

Please take this as constructive criticism, because I like your project overall, and want to only encourage you:

Please consider testing your project in older browsers, and including no-JS configurations in your testing suite.

It is easy, as a developer with a beefy machine with the latest and greatest installed, to overlook these possibilities, and it severely limits the accessibility of your site by older devices, slower connections, security-conscious users, and other edge cases.

I applaud your effort.

Building is the first step, sustaining is the second.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Figure out how to sustain the site and info density will become less of an issue.