To think that I am a very sad human being but I'm going to ask anyway....

[stillawip]

Hi everyone,
I have lots of cookbooks, and whenever I have something to use up in the fridge, I would like to be able to go straight to a recipe in one of my books that uses that ingredient. Or, if I want to cook a particular dish (say apple pie), I want to be able to find out quickly which of my books have a recipe for apple pie in, rather than trawling them all. So, being the sad human being that I am, some years ago I started to make an index on Microsoft Excel of all the recipes in my favourite books, and then categorising them under appropriate headings (so for apple pie it would appear if I looked under 'Apples', 'Desserts - Sweet pies' and 'Desserts - Fruit' ) thus making it easy for me to search. The list has now grown like Topsy & I would love to know how to automate what I am doing a bit more, but I don't know what that would be called!! How could I do that?

Do I need a catalogue function? An index? A drop-down list? Any ideas?!

YABU - you are a very sad human being and you should go & lie down in a darkened room for at least a year.
YANBU - this is a genius idea & here's my suggestion

Download MariaDB

Enter items into database
Use Mapping tool
Add metadata terms for searching ( desserts, sweet, bake, etc)
Create the interface you want (eg: click here for all desserts, show recipe x)

Cook

Distribute to those of us who know the above but are currently waiting on a Chinese takeaway as own cooking is so abysmal 😀

Here’s what I would do….

• 1 line per recipe

columns

• Author,
• Book title,
• recipe name,
• page number (if you have it),
• type (dessert, main, side, appetizer, etc.) you can make this a drop down list -see data validation ,
• Main ingredient From your example this might be apples

The next columns I’d start with lumping several things in one column. These can always be separated later if you want. Just make sure you separate with a comma

• Secondary ingredients To start you can lump multiple ingredients together separated by a comma
• pantry ingredients now we’re getting nit picky so you don’t have to do this one would be helpful is you know your out of flour for example -separate with a comma
• spices same as above but can help you filter if a recipe has some exotic spices that you don’t usually have on hand separate with a comma

Other helpful columns but not necessary

• Prep Time
• rating
• notes

An entry might look like this:
Jones, Mary|Cooking with Excel|Apple Crumble|273|Desert|Apple|rasberry,lemon,raisins|flour,salt,rolledoats|cinnamon,allspice,vanilla

Option 1:
Use the filter function to search on the main ingredient… apple
You can then use the same filter to exclude rolled oats if you know you’re out

Option 2:
create a pivot table
play around until you get what you want… but again you can use filters to include or exclude as needed

I have a Samsung smart fridge and it does make some meal suggestions based on what is in the fridge but I've found it's very americanised.

We mostly use it to watch Bluey on in the morning and for the family diary and somewhere to electronically save/display our favourite family photos.

It's fab but the meal planning bit is the thing I thought I would use the most and probably gets used the least.

I use chat gpt for this. You have to refine your question a bit sometimes, and sometimes it gives stupid suggestions, like the time I asked it how to feed four people with one gammon steak and it basically suggested I cut it into four pieces and put it with some potatoes.😂 (Don't worry, I was using leftovers, I don't need a food bank.)

But it has also come up with some good ideas. Like the time I told it I had a leftover bit of pork mince, a bit of beef mince and some mashing potatoes and it told me to make Swedish meatballs, which I'd never had before and wouldn't have thought of. It also suggested a very tasty sounding tagine which I have yet to make.

I don't entirely trust the actual recipes it comes up with though so I usually take the suggestion and find one on the net with a good rating.

there's already a website for this https://www.supercook.com/#/desktop

I think I know exactly what you are looking for.... is it a wife? I am free for the job, thanks 😍

Nothing to add to the advice at the moment as whiskey has been consumed but I retired last year after (many years) working with databases and when I can’t sleep, I think of a subject and try and design a database to fit it. I may use this as an example 😂

I don’t have advice I’m afraid, but just wanted to say how much I absolutely love this. Cracking idea op

Oh OP you are me (if I actually followed thru with ideas). I have tracked every game of Scrabble DH & I have played (& my sons too) down to each letter used with symbols & keys for tile type. All in a beautiful slim paperblanks book. I started this cos I was convinced I get more of the i tile than anyone else.

Should I ever need to I can recreate any game we've played step by step...which has ZERO purpose! Yours does & it's wonderful.

Apologies, curry & DVD night intervened. As did a couple of glasses of Majestic’s finest….ANYWAY, I am literally going to write all these suggestions down & try them all! The trouble is, I don’t really know what I want, so it’s tricky to enunciate!
I’ll try again tho….I want to type in ‘Apple pie’ and ‘Mary Berry (recipes) book’ in columns 1 and 3, but in Column 2 I’d like an easy way of ‘labelling’ the recipe (yes, a bit like gmails, as a PP said - thank you!) to, say, 5 different categories rather than having to type 5 different lines and manually type in each category. Clear as mud? Sorry!

Btw, some of the other ideas (eg the Scrabble one) are utter genius and I have clearly found my tribe here. These things truly thrill me - my holiday packing list (covering various holiday scenarios with or without the dogs) genuinely stretches to 8 pages 🤣🤣🤣

Ps it is my absolute dream that at some point in the future, my children will be heard to say “oh there’s nothing like mums apple pie/sticky toffee pudding/chocolate cake” and so sometimes we have Test Kitchen Sunday lunches, where I’ll find all the recipes in my books for apple pie/ sticky toffee pudding/ chocolate cake and then I’ll cook them all and we sit round the table and judge them all, vote which is the best and then that one becomes Mum’s Recipe, forever enshrined in family folklore. Told you I was sad!!!!!

I used to do this. Subscribe to Eat Your Books. You tell it the books you have, creating one giant index of your books. It’s great.

Ye, I did try Eat Your Books a few years ago, but it didn’t have lots of my books on it at the time, and I couldn’t work out how to copy & paste it into my format….but maybe I should revisit it now. 🙏🏼

I’m not really sure what you mean by 5 different lines, but you need more columns than 3.

Every individual cell in your table needs to have one bit of data in it. You’ve put in 5 bits of data in column B. You need to split them out. That will make it easier and quicker to populate and easier to search.

Doesn’t google just tell you this if you type that in? And with millions more up to day results

Power app. (Edited to add - create your own power app)

"Go on google"
"Go on recipe sites"

Bloody hell. Read the OP. She doesn't want to wade through thousands of decreasingly relevant Google results, she wants to categorise a specific set of recipes in specific books in a way that is useful to her.

I haven't read the whole thread, but has anyone suggested ChatGPT already?

I found it brilliant for tasks like this (admittedly, I don't use it for the list of ingredients, but rather to find a recipe that excludes certain ingredients and flavour profiles, as all my family is picky eaters and the resulting venn diagrams of who eats what are ridiculous). Also to adjust workout routines under similar inclusion / exclusion principle (this hurts, this is injured, write me a 30 mins workout programm).

OP doesn’t want to Google/ChaTGDP recipes for certain ingredients! She wants to catalogue the recipes in her existing collection, which is a great idea.

Yes, but you can feed them to ChatGPT and ask to catalogue for you, rather than do it manually.

Drop down list is what I would choose in your shoes.

Ooh, that scares me!!! ChatGPT? Isn't that something to do with AI? Knowing me, I'd create a monster....

OMG I've literally just done a drop-down list!!!! Never done one before. This may change my life....!!!
I mean, the drop down list has 7871 entries on it (yes, really, I may possibly have overthought my categories), but it's a start!!

@stillawip honestly, go for the Recipe Keeper app. It covers your needs exactly.

• add a new recipie.

- type it in, or import via a Web link, or scan from a photo of a recipie page on your shelf.

• tag the recipie with as many categories as you want. Courses, eg lunch, dinner. Categories, casserole, chicken, slow cooker, complicated etc. Husband hates this, whatever!

When you import all of the recipie info comes in too (serving size, prep time, cook time, nutritional info, a photo). If you really want to you can build collection for example Christmas, so those recipes are separate from shepherd's pie everyday stuff.

Great, next there is a meal planner. Select how many days you want a plan for eg 6 dinners. Tell it if you don't want 'chicken' or anything you've cooked in the last 3 weeks. Accept or reject the selections until you're happy.

Use the meal planner to create a shopping list. It totals up 2 onions in one recipie with 1 in another, to tell you to buy 3 onions.

I keep a separate household shopping list there too. so I created a big 'master list" of usual household stuff, bread milk shampoo blah blah. I take a copy of that big list and copy it into that weeks recipie list and delete stuff that I don't need to buy, so now it contains the things I need for recipies and the other stuff. Easy to print the list out. Oh, and the list automatically puts stuff into categories, so dairy, canned goods, deli.

Recipies can have 'star' ratings, marked as a favourite, and have a notes section.

You can share a link to the recipie if someone else is cooking that night.

I think you want to find recipies based on ingredients. I searched 'cinnamon potato onion' and have 5 recipes that came back.

And, as if that isn't enough, you just mentioned something about the family favourite recipies to pass along to the kids. It will literally let you create your own pdf cookbook, that you could produce for child going to uni, or leaving home !

Honestly it's amazing, paid version is worth it over and over. Hope this helps :)