We're not short on recipes — we're short on overview

If a shortage of recipes were the problem, it would have been solved twenty years ago. The internet is full of them: free, well-tested, with photos. And still we stand there at 5:30 p.m. not knowing what to eat.

There are saved recipes in screenshots, in bookmarks, in a text from a friend, in three different apps and a cookbook on the shelf. That's not a shortage. It's a pile. And a pile doesn't help when the real question isn't "is there a good recipe?" but "what should we eat this week, and what do I need to buy for it?"

What your head shouldn't be for

Try totting up an ordinary week: which days is there time to cook, what do we already have, what needs buying, who's home when, and what was it we said we'd make on the weekend? None of those questions are hard. But they all have to be held in your head at the same time — and your head is a bad place to store a week.

We've got plenty of recipes. What's missing is one place for the week to live.

That's why another recipe page doesn't solve anything. What solves something is the dishes, the plan and the shopping hanging together: that a saved recipe can go straight into a week, that the shopping list follows along on its own, and that you can see it all in one place, even when you're standing in the store. Even the pile can come along: screenshots, cooking videos and links become real recipes in your book.

The appetite comes back with the overview

The nice thing is what happens once the overview is there. With the plan in place, recipes become fun again: you browse out of desire, not necessity. Dinner stops being an equation and becomes what it once was: something to look forward to.