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Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

What if the same ingredient is used twice in a recipe, for example for cooking and finishing?

Here is an example from Cooking for Engineers - Lemon Bars. If you scroll down to the recipe you can see it uses all-purpose flour twice and lists it two times on the left side of the table.

https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/33/Lemon-Bars

This makes it real hard to determine the total amount of flour needed. Maybe add another column to the left, that sums up all the ingredients, in the format you might get it at the store. Then the second column becomes the mise en plas step, where the base ingredients are divided and prepared/chopped/grated etc.

Problem is column 1 and 2 wont necesarily have ingredients on the same row...

Left columns is raw ingredients no? LLM did perfect job with summing it. This is like instruction plate not shopping list. Can transform trivially.

I think of them as 2 different nodes, 2 instances of the same type of ingredient.

Practically I just have it listed twice if it's important like butter.

https://cookbook.cstebbins.com/recipe/the-best-swedish-meatb...

otherwise if it's a staple like salt I just say something like "stir in and season with additional salt and pepper to taste"

like in https://cookbook.cstebbins.com/recipe/sloppy-sophisto-joes

> I think of them as 2 different nodes, 2 instances of the same type of ingredient.

But this is inconvenient during the shopping step of the process. There you want all uses of an ingredient (possibly across multiple recipes) collapsed into 1 node.

for sure! The use case I'm solving for myself is easy lookup while I'm cooking which is different than the use case of me going shopping

Maybe someday I'll add a feature to grab a shopping list. Could organise it into sections of the store and do a quick traveling salesman problem :D

also due to the conciseness of the grid, it's also not great if you're making it for the first time

> The use case I'm solving for myself is easy lookup while I'm cooking

This is a constant source of stress for me cooking from cookbooks I otherwise like. I prefer to measure on-demand, and wish the steps would just duplicate the quantities of the ingredients "whisk in the olive oil (1/4 cup)" instead of "whisk in the olive oil" so I don't have to scan the list of ingredients and figure it out

Duplicating the nodes is also far from ideal when the reused node is not a raw ingredient but an intermediate with possibly complex dependencies itself. Duplicating the whole subtree would not be helpful.

What if there was one further section in the left column that runs across the y axis and tallies ingredients?

That way there are three "segments" of the spreadsheet: shopping; prep; cooking.

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