Recipe management
Make a Mealie of it
David Rutland dons a tall hat to prepare you a portion of Mealie – a sophisticated recipe management server with a side of meal planning.
MEALIE
Credit: https://mealie.io
OUR EXPERT
David Rutland has finally moved on from his student days of living on jacket potatoes and baked beans. His friends and family are relieved.
Everybody eats. The chemical reactions upon which life depends break down complex molecules and release the energy needed to build other complex molecules, build bodies and build brains (careful now!–ED).
Contrary to certain historical beliefs, man can live on bread alone – but it’s nutritionally better if it’s a keema naan with extra pea flour. Even so, the finest curry house cuisine fails to inspire if you have the same thing every day.
So, it should come as no surprise to discover that recipes are some of the oldest examples of writing that still exist today. Visit the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, and you’ll be able to read 25 recipes for stews and broth etched into stone tablets that have survived for four millennia – at least you would be able to if you could read ancient Sumerian cuneiform.
Recipes serve as both inspiration and a set of instructions – simultaneously solving the ever-present conundrum of what you can have for lunch, along with the necessary follow-on queries of what do you need to make it, and how do you cook it?
OUT AND ABOUT WITH MEALIE
Perusing recipes on your laptop is all very well when you’re relaxing on the sofa, flicking through your own virtual Mrs Beeton. But you’d look silly cruising down the aisles of Lidl with a 15-inch clamshell perched on the child seat of your trolley. Thankfully, Mealie’s web interface is responsive, and adapts to suit any size of device.
Visit your recipe instance on a standard mobile phone, and the layout shifts so your ingredients list is near the top, and you’ll notice that next to each item is a checkbox. This makes it super-simple to ensure you have everything you need before you leave the shop – tap the checkbox to mark that the required item is in your basket.
You can pin a Mealie browser shortcut to your mobile desktop, but sadly, there are no official apps available.
Various third-party developers have filled the gap on Android with apps that send a recipe from your browser directly to Mealie – which is a decent quality of life improvement. And there’s the excellent Mealient. While it only has around 1,000 downloads at the time of writing, Mealient is worth a look, and gives you a mobile-optimised front-end that’s perfect for using with one hand while you balance three boxes of wine and half a chicken in the other.
Despite a cursory inspection of Apple’s App Store, we were unable to find anything for iOS.