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Comment by aimor | Hacker News Reader

In general I've given up on recipe aggregate sites. I have to be half-familiar with the dish just to fix all the things wrong with the recipes I find. In my opinion, divorcing the recipe from the curator is a huge mistake and no amount of user reviews overcomes this. What I really want to see are the recipes that some specific person actually makes in their daily life. Not icons who publish more recipes under their name than a single person could make in a lifetime, or test kitchens obsessed with creating the scientifically proven ideal form of a chocolate chip cookie, and definitely not bloggers churning out stories to grow an audience. I want John, who likes to cook, to let me leaf around in his recipe box (the one he actually uses), and if I make a dish and like it I want to be able to go back and dig around for more. I know this authenticity exists online, but I don't know how to find it. I imagine it as a big list of personal recipe box websites.

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Shameless plug but I tried to do that at https://www.sammakesfood.com. I made videos for the recipes too, but you do not have to watch those. It was a hobby project (not monetized) so no garbage. If somebody did this with maybe 30-75 mainstays and added search, is that kinda what you’re looking for? I stopped because I wasn’t sure if it would help anybody. My family enjoyed the videos during the pandemic as an alternate way to see me though, so, still worth it :D

I love the simplicity of this. So readable.

Thanks! I was going for no frills so I’m glad it came out that way for you.

This seems like something I absolutely need, especially as a college student. I don't know how to cook good healthy meals, but I want to learn how (especially cheaply if I can).

If it helps at all, my advice is to pick one approachable dish you love to eat and learn to cook it. Do it again and again and get good at that one dish, adjusting it each time as you eat it and think “oh this part could be better I’ll focus on that next time”

By the time you are good at that dish you will have invariably learned skills that transfer to related dishes, as well as how to taste and adjust. So you pick the next to learn. To make a product analogy, it’s vaguely like “Crossing the Chasm”.

Learning to cook this way is wonderful because you begin to see how dishes come together and start to imagine your own recipes! Whereas if you cook a new dish every time, you get spread a little thin and lots of cooking remains frustratingly “magical.”

Yes, that is absolutely helpful! Thank you so much.

Watched one video, and the recipes are good and the video production values are really high, and yet the views are really low. I have no great advice on how to fix that, all the ingredients (ha) seem to be there. I guess having watched a bunch of other food videos it seems like the gimmicks come first and the basics come second? Like babish with the TV food reproduction and emmy with the vintage MRE's. In the great war with the search machines there are few winners.

This is basically the reason I stopped, I psychologically cared too much about attention, but was completely uninterested in learning how to game the system for views or market it, because in comes the garbage. It was a fault of my own imagination but still felt bad. Posting here has rekindled my love for the project itself though, so that makes me happy. Thanks for your kind words!

Great content man! Love the home made "bon appetit" vibe

Much thanks!

Actually I enjoyed the videos I watched. I'd say your site is spot on: one person's collection of recipes they like to make.

My suggestion is to add a concise index. I didn't like browsing the paginated images.

Unrelated to your site, what I find most difficult with my own collection is resisting the urge to add new recipes. I want to be able to pick any recipe from my box and know that I think it's absolutely delicious. Of course everyone has different goals, that's part of the charm of personal collections.

Thanks for the feedback! When I get back to the project I’ll look into an index. That “feels” better than search to me, for a collection < 100 recipes.

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