Oops, I missed it by a day. I thought they’d send me an email reminder. But anyway, I’ll share a web app idea that I’ve been thinking about. It would reduce food waste and be generally helpful. It might even encourage people to cook at home instead of eat out!

The foundation would be a huge database of recipes and ingredients. Doesn’t sound too difficult really. But using that database, users could select a recipe and that recipe would be matched with another that would use up the left-over ingredients. I don’t know about you, but I always have something rotting in my fridge that didn’t get used up. This app would reduce that and make picking out a weekly menu a lot easier. Even I could do it! (Right now I can’t go grocery shopping until my wife makes out the menu for the week.) Along the same lines, if you’ve got some ingredients you want to use up, just enter them in and you’ll be matched up with a recipe.

It sounds so simple, and I’ve looked for something similar, but I didn’t come across anything. Has anyone seen anything like this? It would be like open-source recipes and would revolutionize the cooking world!

On another note, does anyone know if recipes can be copyrighted? I wouldn’t want to have to deal with getting sued by some famous chef because someone put one of his/her recipes on the app.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 8:46 am and is filed under web development and tagged with blog-action-day, recipe, web-app. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.