As many of you know, I love to eat. What I spend on food in a month could feed a family of four for the same time period. What I hate is cooking. I get distracted when I’m cooking, I never have the right ingredients for what I want to cook, and sometimes, I just don’t know what I want to cook with the ingredients that I have. The first two are something that no application or website is going to help me with. But I just found a website to help with the third.
Supercook.com allows you to enter the ingredients that you currently have in your kitchen, what ingredients you will never cook with (I hate the sea and everything in it), and returns a list of recipes that you can cook with those ingredients. It pulls the recipes from various different sites, such as allrecipes.com and recipezaar.com, I even saw one from Martha Stuart’s site. And if you don’t see anything in the list of recipes that you have all the ingredients for, it has recommendations with one or two ingredients that you need to buy.
Now, if you go to the actual site, you have the option of creating an account, which allows you to save your favourite recipes that you’ve tried. But the way that I found it was an add-on to iGoogle’s page. The Google add-on has pretty much the same functionality, just doesn’t allow you to save your favourite recipes.
I found this rather neat, as a few months ago I had thought somebody needed to do this. I of course didn’t find this site then, but it got my mind spinning. What I think would be the greatest evolution of this is the supercook.com app. Of course it doesn’t have to be supercook, but something similar for your smart phone. When you do your grocery shopping, scan the barcode of the items that you buy with your phone, and it adds it to your kitchen (what supercook calls it’s database of your ingredients). This in turn would automatically update your recipes available to cook. As you run out of items, scan each one to remove it, and again, it updates the recipes available to cook. And if the item removed was included in one of your favourited recipes, have the program add the item to a shopping list so you don’t forget the next time you go shopping.
From a quick search I see that every major smart phone OS has some form of barcode reader, so most newer phones would be able to use such a program. It would just take somebody to think about programming it.  Preferably for Android first though. That’s going to be my next phone OS, so it would be nice to see that. Hint Hint. I could of course try to learn programming, and do it myse… oh lazyness just kicked in.
Meh.
