Did you get a thermal printer when they were hot stuff, but then your interest cooled when you couldn’t decide what to do with it? Something similar happened to [Sunyecz22], and the poor printer sat unused until that magical day when the perfect use for it popped up — a random recipe receiver in the form of a toaster.
[Sunyecz22] was tired of searching for recipes every week before going to the grocery store. Between the millions of recipe options on the internet and the 1000-word essays that precede them all, the process was like a part-time job. Now all they have to do is push the little lever down and wait for a recipe to get toasted into some thermal paper. It doesn’t print the full recipe, only the essentials, and we love that. You get the name, the prep time, a rating, and a QR code that links to the recipe page.
This toaster runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero W that fetches recipes using the Spoonacular API and sends the deets to the printer. The lever makes use of some old pen springs to activate a limit switch and start the recipe-getting process. We think it would be extra cool if it stayed down until the recipe popped up. Butter your way past the break to see a short demo video.
We must say, this toaster is way more helpful than the talkie toaster from Red Dwarf.
All this social isolation is dangerous, someone soon is going to think a 100% functional Talkie Toaster is a good idea.
Ah, so you’re a waffle man!
Time like this where it is hard to get certain basic things like milk, flour, eggs, yeast etc, you want a bottom up approach to shopping. i.e. buy what is in stock from the major food groups and find a recipe from what you have or a Chinese take out menu permutation approach: vegetable types x meat types x sauce type x carbohydrate types
Top down approach is fine if there were hoarding related food shortages.
That was also my initial thought, even pre-covid I would buy what was on sale then see what I could make with it.
I am unsure it’s all hoarding… We’ve had dual food supply chains, catering supply and retail, now catering demand has floored, and all those people who bought lunches and supper on the way home are eating at home so all the demand has shifted to the retail side.
I had actually thought up this idea some years ago and was planning to begin work on a system for this (basically inventory everything you have in your kitchen and get a list of recipes for stuff you can make with what’s on hand). However I quickly found during the research process that a number of websites pretty much already do this. Supercook and MyFridgeFood are two immediate options I can recall, but there were others.
I’ve tried some that were useless… bang in dozens of potential ingredients, and it picks one of them and expects you to pull smoked salmon or quails eggs out your arse.
so slow, add the toilet paper to the ingridients
Only if you make chili or indian food.
I would include the ingredients on the print, so it would double up as my shopping list
FWIW, you tell https://www.supercook.com/ what you already have and it will tell you what you can make with it, which is *MUCH* more useful for regular folks.