Tips, tricks, and best practices

This is a list of ideas we think will be helpful to you in answering some more niche questions.

Organize your recipes into folders

If you have more than a few dozen recipes, it can be very helpful to organize your recipes into folders like “Dinners”, “Lunches”, “Breakfasts”, and “Desserts”.

Start with one or a few meal plans, then iterate

You don’t need to start your meal plans from scratch every time, you can always take a meal plan you’ve used before and add or remove recipes, or adjust servings to better suit the coming week.

Put no-prep foods on your meal plans!

It’s nice to have an apple or banana sometimes, but it doesn’t make sense to have a whole “recipe” for them. You can add these to your meal plan and shopping list manually using the edit list function.

If you’re writing a recipe, only @mention each ingredient once.

After the first time, you can simply refer to the ingredient by name and relative quantity (e.g. “then put half the remaining bacon in the oven to crispen.”).

Aim for scalable recipes

When writing a recipe, use the quantity scaling features of Cooklang to make the recipe scale as well as possible. We usually aim to support 3 different serving sizes in our sample recipes. But some recipes don’t scale up or down well, and that’s okay! A cake or pie won’t scale nearly as well as soup.

Send us your tips and tricks!

We love to hear good ideas about how to use Cooklang, CookApp, and CookCLI. Check out our contact page