KitchenPal.page

Kitchen Pal allows you to plan everything you’re going to cook in the near future and then generate a grocery list of everything you need.

I hadn’t heard of anything like this until just the other day. But what is a good web app without some competition? In our case it’s [Tasty Planner](http://tastyplanner.com/). Luckily there are many useful features that Tasty Planner is lacking and things about it that are just annoying. For instance, if you have two of the same item in different recipes, it is listed twice in the grocery list.

I could sit here and name ideas all day, so why don’t I?

* Import and parse recipes from common recipe sites
* Attempt to parse recipes in any format
* Cooking Log – Allow rating, comments, and pictures for each time a meal is prepared
* Wish list of future recipes
* Calculate costs of a grocery list
* Estimate average monthly food costs
* Suggest substitutes for ingredients that would reduce costs
* Keep track of items in the fridge/pantry (so these aren’t added to a grocery list)
* Keep track of expiration dates and give warning/automatically add expired items to list
* Calculate calories and other nutritional data for a meal
* Calculate aggregate nutritional data for an individual
* Suggest recipes based on currently available items, total cost, diet, ratings, how long since last cooked, etc. (criteria weighted by user)
* Suggest menus (e.g., for a full week) using wish list or suggested recipes that would maximize the criteria

I know this would be incredibly useful personally. I’ve had to cook most meals for myself for the first time since I got to Utah last week. The hardest part — moreso than the cooking — is figuring out what I need to buy and how to use what I have.

Most of these features aren’t too difficult. Good data for costs may be impossible to obtain, so it would have to be manually entered or estimated. Also, the meal and menu suggestion components could get very interesting mathematically, especially with all of the varying factors.
Update: ShopSavvy is a barcode scanner for phones that [uses Google Base](http://shopsavvy.mobi/2008/11/04/how-to-get-your-items-on-shopsavvy/) for price info.