Tuesday again
And time for a beer again. My work horse machine is updating, I need items from the shop for someone’s lunch tomorrow, as well as butter and milk in case anyone notices that it’s Shrove/Pancake Tuesday, so I feel justified.
I’ve been working on a half-baked idea - a food app thing. Some time ago I looked at developing a system for managing recipes and menus, potentially for commercial use by small food outlets - independent bars, restaurants and the like. The data would be made up of a layer of ingredients that get added to dishes which then get attached to menus that can be added to events. Each ingredient can be be made of other ingredients so that something like mayonnaise can be added to a dish with any relevant allergies or food intolerances bubbling up to appear as a warning label at the ‘dish’ level.
A more recent twist on this concept is a domestic application. Users can still create dishes/recipes, but instead of menus they can create meals. In terms of the system ‘meals’ are meal events. Their key purpose is to hold a date and time to form a weekly meal planner. It’s a simple idea and having started work on this extension during a couple of car journeys over the past couple of days I should be able to have a working version ready later this evening. Unless there’s an unexpected demand for pancakes of course.
Apart from the ability to create meal plan for a week or two, the bit I’m looking forward to playing with is munging the data to produce a shopping list. It feels like it should be relatively simple to add a little table to display aggregated ingredients data. I’m also thinking of adding a ‘fridge purge’ component so that users can add a list of ingredients that they’ve already got. Then to take it further, I think it might be fun if the system might suggest other dishes that match certain ingredients.
First things first though. Bills need to be paid and there are some areas of my billing system that need attention. I think I might even set a reminder to myself to that effect. Done. This overlaps with my push to get my comms sorted and use emails from my systems to communicate with clients.