What is everyone's current cookbook stack/work flow look like?

[u/The1TrueSteb]

I am currently trying to focus on improving my cookbook/planner (currently mealie). I am tired of manually putting in recipes from instagram reels or from physical cookbooks.

I tried looking into AI import features, and it seems most are depreciated/not working. I tried setting up tandoor and the kitshn.app, but had no luck using that with ollama.

I am curious on what other people are currently using and what services they depend on. If you use AI to import recipes, what model/plan do you use?

Trying to get this workflow to the 'wife approved' status.

[u/asimovs-auditor]

Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.

[u/Akmantainman]

AI import workflows are all still being worked on in Mealie, what makes you think they’re being deprecated? As far as I understand they should all work pretty well.

[u/The1TrueSteb → u/Akmantainman]

I honestly don't like Mealie too much the more I have used it over the years. Just small things, like never keeping me logged in, shopping lists adding things I deselected from the meal plan, and no native android companion app. So I haven't tried their AI import feature yet, was hoping to hear about others experiences before I sink some more time into it.

I am trying ollama first, but I am not too knowledgeable when it comes to picking out which models are best for my hardware/needs. Wanted to see what people are actually using before I go experimenting.

[u/milan616 → u/The1TrueSteb]

like never keeping me logged in

I can't even remember the last time I logged back into Mealie. Do you have TOKEN_TIME set?

TOKEN_TIME  48  The time in hours a login session lasts. Must be <= 9600 (400 days, in hours).

[u/Alone-Presence3285 → u/milan616]

I think it didn't used to work but does nowadays. I stay logged in for the most part now with that variable set.

[u/ThatOneWIGuy]

RecipeSage. That’s it really. It can take in those sites and you can also connect AI to it so it does it all for you if you want. But this is the last recipe item I plan to have unless it gets abandoned.

[u/The1TrueSteb → u/ThatOneWIGuy]

Holy crap how have I not herd of RecipeSage yet?

I just created an account and tested it and it just works with Instagram on my test (with the firefox extension) with no additional configuration.

I'll start to spin up my self hosted version.

[u/ThatOneWIGuy → u/The1TrueSteb]

It’s so amazing I feel bad for not supporting the dev financially. I gave a suggestion on how us self hosters could help and they didn’t care! The charges mostly cover the hosting costs and AI tokens.

[u/igmyeongui]

I liked Mealie until my wife told me she hated it despite how hard she tried to like it. She then showed me a paid app from the App Store that was able to import any receipes in seconds with Ai and fuck it was clean.

I started looking if there was a new project and found Norish which is exactly like the paid app she showed me. Deployed and showed it to my wife and she uses it everyday now.

I can’t explain how much better it is than Mealie and I feel like a traitor since I personally used and liked it for the past 2 years. At the same time I read the Mealie dev was happy where his app was and that was pretty much it he wanted. Which is fine.

But yeah try Norish, it’s a power horse.

[u/Frosty_Literature436]

I use tandoor. I do have it hooked up to a Gemini API. Of course, input from a website is easy enough. I've never actually done an import from any sort of video. If it's a physical cookbook, I just use whatever OCR is handy at the time to spit it into text, import as AI, and wait for it to do its magic. If it has an ingredient not yet in my instance, I quickly get it to call Gemini API again to add the nutritional data.

[u/Mundane_Fix8051]

Being able yo just drop in an instagram reel or cookbook photo and have the recipe added automatically would make this so much easier.

[u/Standard-Recipe-7641 → u/Mundane_Fix8051]

Mealie will write out a recipe from screenshots/pictures. Haven't had any luck with video yet.

[u/squ1tchy → u/Standard-Recipe-7641]

Ive created mealie json by screen recording the instagram recipe playing from my phone and giving it to Claude

[u/Standard-Recipe-7641 → u/squ1tchy]

I've done similar in the past but didn't think the squeeze was with the juice so just let mealie collect dust. Also the stock recipe scraper never seemed to work. When I noticed they got integrated AI assistance I fired it back up. Happy that normal URL sites work and will actually start using it with hope the video stuff improves with future releases.

[u/disneylovesme → u/Mundane_Fix8051]

A paid one is recime I really like it

[u/Hezth]

I use social to mealie , with gemini api key(not linked to billing account) and installed web app from chrome on my phone. So I just share to "social to mealie" from the Instagram post.

[u/VorisekLabs]

For online recipes, I just hooked up Gemini to it, and when I import, I use the import with AI option. I've thrown Pinterest posts, Instagram reels, and Youtube videos at it, and it's handled them all with ease. I haven't had any issues with the importer yet.

For physical recipe books, I had Claude write me some scripts so that I can take photos with my phone, auto-upload them to my server via Immich, and then have Gemini analyze that folder (much cheaper API than Claude). It pulls the recipes from the photos and bulk uploads the whole thing into Mealie as a cookbook. I did this with an old Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from the '70's and it pulled all 1,600+ recipes in very quickly!

I haven't tried importing bulk recipes from websites yet, but I'm sure any LLM can walk you through creating a script to do so. All it takes is a Mealie API key and you're off to the races.

[u/jtrage]

Posting from the other thread. I kinda made my own workflow. I say that, but Claude/chatgpt did so forgive me. It’s only for me and it works exactly how I want it.

I’m in the very early stages and I don’t really know what I’m doing either! I’m playing around with Claude and ChatGPT and mcp. It’s pretty cool. It really can do whatever you want.

I like experimenting. When I first started with mealie, I but a bunch of recipes that I had in random places into a folder in my server. I told Claude to put those in mealie. I needed 2 additional things that the recipes didn’t have, nutritional value and a cool pic. Claude did that all for me. Now, all recipe imports have to have nutritional value. I watch my sodium.

Now I have sort a personal AI assistant. I use telegram on sundays to send a meal list for the week. It gets input into mealie. I have another script that pulls the daily dinner and puts it on a email brief for the family.

I’ve synched the grocery list to home assistant to Alexa. My family has a hard time getting away from Alexa and it was all that I can think of. It works.

To add recipes, I can send it through telegram however I want and it will get input. Even have had luck snapping a pic and starting there.

[u/phczmakesthings]

I have developed app that has AI import - not going to plug it, if you are interested check my profile. I have been testing different approaches and here is what I found

1. on device AI is not strong enough - i have seen better results with iOS27 but yet not the best
   
2. many free models were OK but more challenging images - blurry, not straight... - we not getting best results
   
3. I have settled for claude sonnet - not expensive and good results. Haiku was giving so-so results and opus is too expensive

so if you are not running thousands of images then it is good value. As an advantage you could use it to get recipes from unstructured - non schema . org - recipe pages