What is this?
Welcome, I'm Steven, and you've stumbled upon my recipe notes. Here, I publish recipes for my reference or to share with others, but it's also a sandbox for my experimentation. Things will likely change for the better or worse, so use it at your discretion.
Why another recipe blog?
Personal storage...mostly
There are quite a few recipe management tools that exist, so you may wonder why I'm not using them. You may also be wondering why I've brought up recipe management as if that was the original question. That's because this website is a product of the tool I'm using. It publishes my recipes here.
Now I could be using one of a plethora of applications or WordPress recipe plugins for the job, but none of them fit my needs or comfort. I'm a software engineer, and I like strong semantics and maintainability. Some tools provide basic features like a taxonomy system, ingredient parsing, or version control, but I wanted more. Instead, I thought let's just reinvent the wheel. That's never gone wrong, right?
The tool I'm using for this website is my own, I call it Nutmeg, and it manages all my recipes. It not only manages them, but it also compiles them like software and publishes the results. I now store my recipes as I would with code, on GitHub. When new recipes are pushed up, it publishes the update to my website, and by update, I mean an entirely new website. Yes, this is a statically hosted website (scary). You don't see many of them these days.
Sharing is caring
Through the years and many family gatherings, I've been asked to share my recipes. However, my previous management tool was a notepad filled with arbitrary lists of ingredients. I hadn't written down any steps, unfortunately, because recipes generally have common formulas--so why write them? It's definitely not from laziness.
Now I have a reason to complete my notes, but it may take a while.
Recipe websites should be better
Have you been to a recipe website and asked:
- Where's the recipe?
- Whose autobiography am I reading?
- Why is my phone catching fire?
- Why is the page bouncing around like it's possessed?
Me too. I just want a nice place to read my recipes without being tracked by 50 different data brokers.
Nutmeg, what is it?
Nutmeg is an experiment aimed at improving the management, storage, and publishing of recipes. Specifically my recipes. It's built as a NodeJS library that acts as a frontend compiler for recipes. It generates and hosts a semantic structure usable by a publishing backend. The backend in this case is a NextJS-based static website. It's highly inspired by tools like markdown and jekyll. If it does ever become viable, it and this website will be open-sourced.