Changing the Recipes-Game

Danel

I would love to do a "Steeve Jobs"-Inspired video but I am a bit shy, but over the past weeks that I have been using Cronometer I have noticed three things. This is going to be a bit lengthly, so grab a tea ^^

First - I absolutly love the app, the website and having the insight into all of the different nutrients. Since I am kind of a numbers guy this website really helps me to get not only my diet right but more importantly to get my diet on the healthy track. So yeah - I want to thank the team I guess to making such a great product / service.

Secondly - there is a slight bug I guess. I cannot sort my receipies by name. Small and minor detail but my OCD is going rampage ^^. I tried all the tricks but nothing brought it to work so maybe some of you would be able to look into it?

But now the real reason I am opening that post and that is not really a feature but more a better way of utelizing or handeling recipies. Currently recipies and their individual ingredients are pretty much set into stone. If you have a chilli for example which called for 200g of sauteed red onion, well that's what you would put into the recipies, but when you are finally done chooping up your onion, took a minute to whipe these tears away and sauteed all the cut onion you end up with, lets say 120g of them. Well in that case you are not really cutting up some more until you fill the 200g that were requested. Or lets say I went grocery shopping for that same chilli and I forgot to buy garlic - is a bummer but I will not drive to the supermarket again just for garlic. So I leave it. This will ultimatly lead to my counting not beeing correct, because there might be things completly missing, I might overshoot and the other end because I put too much, or that there is just too less because I just didn't had enough of one ingridient. These might be small examples but I could write about some that actually happened to me, but I think in general you kind of get the idea.
So the idea that I came up with is, that a recipies is still a recipies, but instead of just putting it into your diary, would it be possible to insert the recipies with all the ingridients listed under it with all the values for those ingridients with an indent (I think it's called) and the ability to adjust single values. So the 200g of sauteed red onion are more something to aim for but I can enter the real value / weight that I used for a specific ingridient? This way I will not change the recipies itself, which would ultimatly mess with all my history by changing the value of that very recipies.

So I try to enter an example and hope it will bring the idea across.

Chilli:
1. Beef 500g
2. Beans 800g
3. Tomato Sauce 1000g
.
.
.

So this is how a recipie would appear in the diary section ofter adding it and now I would have the possibility to change the amount of every ingridient. This way every entry, every finished day and every time I recook something is left untouched from furture changes / adjustments, my calories are accurate and I am happy. Would that be possible?

If something is not clear I am here to explain it, but I think that's the best way I could put it in a forum post format - at least as an initial one to convey my super awsome idea ^^

Thanks for your time and have a good day!

planteater

It doesn't work exactly the way you described, but you CAN use the "Explode Recipe" function by right clicking on the recipe in your diary, and it will break down however many servings you had into individual ingredients.

If your recipe makes 4 servings and you only ate 2, you'd still have to adjust because the ingredients would show 100 g of red onion (half of the 200 g in the original recipe) and you'd need to change it to 60 (half of the 120 g that you actually had).

So you'd still have to do some minor math, but you could adjust or take out the garlic as needed.

Danel

Oh - I actually didn't know that, guess I should take some lessons at the cronometer school and take a closer look at these videos. Thanks a lot for the hint and pointing me at the right direction. Really appriciated.

Would be nice tho to have it as a drop down, so it I don't have to scroll for days to find everything and that I know what all the ingridients are for (recalling what I actually cooked). Just mentioning.

Hilary

@Danel, The sort recipes function sorts your recipes based on when you created the recipe. The options as of right now are most recent First or least recent first. I have seen a couple of other people asking for alphabetical listing though so maybe this is something we could look into adding. If you are trying to find a recipe, you can also use the search dialogue and simply type in the name. With the new tabs in the search dialogue, you can also search within only your recipes and custom foods to find something.
@planteater is absolutely right! The Explode recipe feature will solve that problem for you! You can also edit a recipe permanently - or non-permanently if you like (recipes are always editable) - by opening the recipe from the Foods tab. To make entering a serving size easier you can also create multiple serving sizes that correlate an easy measurement with a gram amount so you don't have to weigh your meals every time you eat.
Also, if you dont want to permanently change a recipe but you have made it differently and used the explode recipe function to change the amounts, you can multiselect the ingredients from a previous day and simply copy them in to your current day's diary so that you don't have to explode the recipe and adjust the values everytime if you are eating leftovers.
Hope this helps! (And I hope I didn't make this more confusing for you!)