Recipe Generator

My partner and I had been having issues trying to keep track of our collection of recipes that we had been building up from family members, cookbooks, and random internet sites.

We had tried using a couple of different apps, but had the problem that we wanted a paper version so we could easily have it open in the kitchen, and mark it up as we iterated/improved the recipe.

Our main goals were to have something easy to edit and update, and have a quick process to create a new paper version without much effort. We decided that our base recipes should be stored as markdown, which solved the easily editable issue.

I then decided that we should just convert those markdown files to HTML (using MarkDig) and then used Playwright to print them to PDF. During the Playwright Print to PDF portion I injected custom styles that controlled the recipe layout.

To create recipe PDFs you would put your markdown files into the markdown folder and then run docker compose up and PDFs would be spit out into a PDFs folder.

View the code on the Recipe Generater Github

One downside was that we wanted to have some custom elements to make the printed recipe a bit more elegant, so we had some non-standard markdown added that markdig would convert to divs. Sample Markdown:

                    :::::container
                    ::::topbar
                    ::::
                    ::::main
                    :::title{.gold-banner}
                    # Alfredo Sauce
                    :::
                    :::ingredients
                    ## Ingredients
                    - 1/2 cup butter
                    - 1 pint heavy whipping cream
                    - 4 oz of cream cheese
                    - 1/2 tsp of minced garlic
                    - 1 cup of parmesan
                    - Garlic powder
                    - Italian seasoning
                    - Flour (for thickening)
                    :::
                    :::recipe
                    ## Recipe
                    1. Add butter, cream, and cream cheese into a sauce pan and melt.
                    2. Season to taste with garlic powder, italian seasoning, salt, and pepper.
                    3. Add shredded cheese. Bring to a simmer and cook for 3-5 minutes, constantly stirring, until thick.
                    4. Add flour for extra thickness if needed.
                    :::
                    ::::
                    :::::