Ever since I first saw this, whenever I get a recipe, from anywhere, I convert it by hand to this format.
Perhaps you can automate that process? That would be rad!
[1] http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/108/Banana-Nut-Bre...
https://modernistcuisine.com/recipes/silky-smooth-macaroni-and-cheese/Personally I find RxOL hard to read & edit though, so I have been thinking about whether it would be doable able to infer such tree structures from CookLang's more readable recipe format[1][2].
Ingredients and times are already marked, so surely verbs & follow up mentions of ingredients can be extracted from the text without further annotation? Haven't tried doing it yet though.
Just like with a Lisp, the benefit is that you always see at first glance what is the noun and what is the verb. With other recipes, you have to read through an entire “step“ instruction in order to parse that information.
Some of the comments on the site from ~2005 are so quaint ("Great site. Am linking to you!", etc.). Makes me feel like I'm in a quaint old-world town: proud of its anachronisms that morph into charm and wisdom with the passage of time.
1. Read and do all the "full-width" items at the top first as preparation
2. The remaining items in the tabulated recipe should be read as a combination dependency graph and Gantt chart. E.g. mashing ripe bananas can be done in parallel with melting the butter and beating the eggs, but all three must be completed in order to move onto the step of "mashing until smooth" all those ingredients together with the vanilla extract ingredient. This way of reading is more of a "left to right" approach.
I recommend John Montroll's origami books.