Cookbook

A big part of what Vittles does is manage recipes, and the Cookbook app is what handles this.

What you’re likely to work with most often is Recipes. Each recipe has a name, and includes a list of ingredients, some paragraphs of instruction, and several optional fields such as category, rating, preparation time, and yield.

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The only required field is Name; all others are optional. Some dropdown fields include a green + button, which you can use to add new values if the one you want isn’t present in the dropdown already.

Prep Time

These optional fields indicate how long your recipe takes to prepare and cook; you can use them in whatever way makes sense to you, but the intended usage is something like this:

Prep minutes
Time spent gathering, preparing, and mixing the ingredients
Inactive prep minutes
Time spent waiting, for example when meat is marinating, or bread dough is rising
Cook minutes
Time spent actually cooking or baking

Again, you can leave these blank if you don’t feel like estimating them, but many published recipes already include this information, so it’s easy to enter if you’re so inclined.

Servings

Each recipe is presumed to make some number of servings, but it’s up to you how you would like to define your servings. Obviously, some people eat bigger servings than others, so you may want to specify what exactly you mean by “Makes 4 servings”.

For example, a muffin recipe may make 12 muffins. If that’s the case, you can enter a Yield of “12”, and a Portion of “muffin”. When you’re making pancakes, you can specify how many pancakes the recipe makes, and how big the pancakes are. If you like big pancakes, your recipe may have Yield = “4”, Portion = “6-inch pancake”, but if you’re going for silver-dollar-size, you might enter Yield = “24”, Portion = “2-inch pancake”.

Note that the Portion field is singular, and will be automatically pluralized when the context calls for it. So don’t use a portion of “2-inch pancakes”, or else your servings will be Gollumized into “24 2-inch pancakeses.”

Ingredients

When creating a new recipe, you’ll have several empty Ingredient rows; the most effective way to navigate these is with the keyboard, since many of the fields are dropdowns. When you’re in a dropdown, as soon as you start typing a few letters, the first match will be selected. You can then use the arrow keys to select the value you’re looking for. Many times, it only takes two or three keystrokes to enter the desired value.

The optional Category field for each ingredient allows you to divide up the ingredients into logical groups. For example, muffins call for combining the wet ingredients and dry ingredients separately. You could also use it to separate the cake ingredients from the icing ingredients. Add new categories if the existing ones don’t suit your needs. For simple recipes, you can omit this field entirely.

The Quantity field accepts both decimals and fractions. For example, if your recipe calls for two and one-half cups of flour, you could enter “2.5” or “2-1/2”, then tab over to the Unit field and type “cu” to get cups. If the ingredient has no unit (for example, 2 eggs), just leave the “Unit” field empty.

Preparation is where you can specify how the ingredient is to be prepared. Flour may need to be sifted, eggs may need to be beaten, etc. If no preparation is needed, you can leave this unfilled also.

Next, and most importantly, the Food field is where you choose the food for this ingredient. It’s at the end to allow a more natural reading across the fields; maybe if Jean-Luc Picard had designed it, the food may have come first, so he could say “Tea, Earl Grey, hot.”

At the end of each food row is an Optional checkbox, for ingredients that can be safely omitted from the recipe with no ill effects. When you’re editing an existing recipe, you’ll also see a Delete checkbox here, which you can use (in conjunction with the red “Delete” link in the lower-left corner) to remove ingredients.

Finally, click the Save button when you’re done editing.

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