I gotta say it: I am a foodie! However, one of the things I hate the most is grocery shopping and spending my evenings cooking. I have been meal prepping for years without knowing but as the family grew, I needed to prepare more portions and diversify a lot more. Ever since I started cooking, I ran into two main problems:
- What to cook
- When to cook
I cook scroll for hours in search of the next tasty recipe to only find out I was always missing one vital ingredient. Or I would nearly pass out because I would start cooking when I was already getting hungry.
In my quest to optimize the process, I found the "Cooking 2h for 1 week" method (translated from the French batchcooking recipe book 'En 2h, je cuisine pour toute la semaine'). This method selects for you 5 recipes for the week, list all ingredients needed and arrange every steps of all 5 recipes so that they can be run in sequence or in parallel. I would only need to go to the store once a week, buy everything and spend a few hours on Sundays to prep for the week: P.E.R.F.E.C.T!
The main issue with a book is that it can be limited or limiting. Sometimes your own diet does not fit, or you might be a picky eater, or you can't the find the products locally. It can become really tricky to adapt recipes.
I thought I could automate this with R and use NLP methods to sort the recipe steps.
This project does a set of steps:
- Store your personal diet for later,
- Select X recipes from scrapping public recipe websites,
- Prepare a shopping list,
- Organize/Sort cooking steps to make it as seamless as possible,
- and last: SAVE YOU TIME (and money)!