LXF SERVER

Credit: https://hay-kot.github.

David Rutland steps out of his stainless steel dream kitchen and makes a meal of cookbook applications on the unofficial Linux Format VPS

OUR EXPERT

David Rutland is chained to a hot stove for most of the day. He wouldn’t mind, except nobody likes his cooking.

Everyone loves food, and there’s a good chance that somewhere in your house there’s a stack of recipe books or magazines gathering dust. Maybe you inherited them, or perhaps you’ve been acquiring a collection over the years. At Chez Rutland, there’s only one recipe book in regular use: The Curry Guy Bible by Dan Toombs

For everything else, we turn to the internet. Need ideas for an impromptu 100-person impromptu garden party and already fed up with cheese and wine (careful now–Ed)? Hit up a search engine for ideas and recipes. No clue what to do for date night? DuckDuckGo it (as always, other search engines are available).

Doing all this leads to comfortably full stomachs, and more questions. How do you keep track of what you’ve cooked, how well it was received, and, more to the point, how do you find it again once the initial sated satisfaction has subsided?

Sure, you vaguely recall that the salmon wellington you made at Christmas was particularly popular, and you’d like to impress your new girlfriend with your culinary skills, but where on earth are the instructions?

For some people, it seems like a great idea to painstakingly print out recipes directly from the site, laminate them, and store them in a binder. Others prefer to rely on browser bookmarks to store the location of their preferred puttanesca.

Neither of these approaches is good enough. Printed recipes take up space and are only searchable using the most primitive of technologies, while bookmarks are mere pointers to a Schrödinger’s web address which may or may not still exist.

No. Cooks need, and deserve, something better: a way of storing recipes in a searchable format, which won’t disappear when the original blog author loses interest and their web space is taken over by Eastern European cybersquatters shilling spurious crypto coins.

Fortunately, we aren’t alone in thinking this, and there are a number of self-hosted FOSS projects devoted to making your culinary life easier. This will enable you to store the secrets of your sauces on your very own VPS – accessible to you from anywhere in the world. Browse ours at https://recipes.lxf.by.

A moment of honesty: this author has only come up with two or three completely original recipes in their entire life, mostly based on random food items found in the discount bin of the local supermarket. Nonetheless, he’s pretty proud of them, and would be upset if his culinary creations were altogether lost to the mists of time. Any recipe management software needs to enable users the ability to create recipes from scratch, list their own ingredients and methods, and supply photographs.