The project
Recipes scattered across bookmarks, screenshots and notebooks: Recipetory is a prototype built for use at home, for two, to gather every recipe in one place and get from craving to shopping list faster.
It is a deliberately short project, built in about ten days to test an idea end to end, from the API to the app.
What the prototype does
- import a recipe by simply pasting its link: ingredients, quantities, cooking time and photo are fetched automatically;
- a recipe library with filters, plus favourites, ratings and comments per profile;
- shopping baskets that combine several recipes and extra items;
- tools to keep the data clean: merging duplicates, aliases ('tbsp' = 'tablespoon') and unit conversions.
Under the hood
The mobile app is built with Expo and React Native in TypeScript, with file-based navigation (expo-router) and NativeWind for styling. On the server, a REST API with Express and MongoDB. Importing relies on per-site readers: a generic reader uses the Schema.org structured data most cooking sites publish, and dedicated readers take over for sites that don't expose it cleanly, such as Marmiton.
Next steps
- support for more websites (Cuisine AZ, 750g, Ricardo);
- a consolidated shopping list that adds up the ingredients of every recipe in a basket;
- real user accounts and a release on the app stores.