The cook log
Recipes are rarely set in stone. Make something enough times and you start to tinker: a little less salt, a hotter oven, a different flour. The trouble has always been where to keep track of it. Scribble in the margin and you’ve marked up your clean copy. Rewrite the recipe and you’ve lost the original.
The cook log fixes that. Each time you cook, jot a note for that session — what you changed, how it turned out — and add a photo. The base recipe stays untouched while your history builds alongside it. Hits, misses, and the occasional structural failure* — all in one place.
You’ll find it at the bottom of any recipe in your library.
Accessibility, and an unexpected lesson
Alongside the usual bug fixes and privacy and security hardening, we spent real time this week going through the app with a screen reader — importing a recipe, working through Cooking Mode, the whole flow — using nothing but keyboard commands and text-to-speech.
It taught me something. I’ve long believed the best way to improve a piece of writing is to read it aloud, because hearing each word overcomes the brain’s habit of skimming over what it assumes is already there. Testing an app with a screen reader works the same way. It reads you every heading, every sentence, every button, and makes you ask of each one whether it earns its place. We cut whatever didn’t, and the interface is cleaner for it.
Thank you for the feedback
A lot of what we build starts with a message from one of you. The new “Add to Shopping List” button, now sitting right under the ingredients, came straight from a suggestion (thank you, JT). More of your ideas are on the near-term list, KC’s included.
One more thing
We also put out a call for beta testers. If you missed it, here’s the post. Comment on it, share it around, send it to the cook in your life who has two hundred recipes spread across a dozen different apps. In this case there really is no such thing as too many cooks.
Joe
*This was supposed to be sourdough. I’m still not sure what happened.
