My take was a little different; I wanted a CLI app that lets me search my recipes, put menus together, and then see views for shopping and cooking: https://github.com/cproctor/cookbook/
One thing I'm looking forward to adding is tagging recipe steps as do-ahead, mis en place, early, late, and last minute. This will make it a bit easier to think through the mental gantt chart I use when cooking a dinner composed of a bunch of dishes. Also a simple scraping utility for importing.
The thing all these have in common is that they're reactions against the festering cesspool of hostile-UI, low-information-density, pages full of affiliate links that are today's cooking sites. (NYT cooking very much excepted.)
I wish we had a better mechanism for including more people in the project of iteratively refining the way we think about life tasks and improving the tools we use to think with. I think this is a great conversation and wish more people who like to cook could participate.
This is a consistently excellent resource, and I love the many small, essential bits of polish they've applied to their iOS app, like preventing your iPhone's screen from turning off when you're reading a recipe.
I've been toying around with the design of a kitchen management program with a lot of overlap in functionality with your program, so that's very cool to see! One feature I had been really interested in having is a nice interface for a version controlled recipe. I want to be able experiment with a recipe and document results and personal preferences.
I ended up building my own solution to this problem too (though mine is not open to public)
The main thing I wanted to optimize was menu planning. So I wrote a genetic algorithm which will generate a menu, add the score, mutate the menu in some way, and iterate. In my database I have a rough price per ingredient, and my families enjoyment of the recipe (though I have kind of a lagging gradient which reduces the score per recipe to prevent duplication). I also have included in my algorithm what I call slots. So something like a lasagna will take 4 slots where as a stir fry will be 1 slot. I sync my schedule and break it down to slots. This allows the algorithm to fit the recipe to the time available. I dont score slots though otherwise short recipes always win.
Since the algorithm optimizes based on the week, but keeps a running inventory it's pretty good at maximizing my grocery bill and family enjoyment. My average grocery bill is between $40-$60 a week. And I cook 5 times a week.
I've done this as well using scraped recipes from a website that conveniently labeled all ingredients with data tags for their referral program.
Although my goal was to find recipes that shared ingredients to cut back on wastage. I used a constraint solver (https://developers.google.com/optimization) and asked it to produce 5 recipes requiring the minimum number of ingredients, and was rather amused that the first run included such classics as "boiled egg", "butter potato" and "toast".
I ended up building my own solution to this problem too (though mine is not open to public)
Me too, although I'm solving a different problem: organization. I'm not so concerned with cost or nutritional value. In the end I went with a somewhat simpler route: LaTeX (well xelatex). I built a couple document classes, one creates a letter sized document and one creates a 4x6 index card sized document. I used the former to concatenate all the recipes into a master PDF as well. This "master" PDF contains the recipes as well as indexes (by author, by ingredient).
I've tried tablets in the kitchen, but ultimately for me the most convenient thing was to just tape a printout onto a cabinet door and go from there.
You mind sharing? My home grown solution also focuses on generating physical documents, but I'm not so happy with my Markdown + custom formatting engine solution.
This sounds like something I would use if it were public. It would be awesome If I could swap recipes from the plan. For example, if I didn't feel like having stir fry I could swap it out for a meal with similar points.
I've thought about making it public, but it's highly optimized for me... also therea no gui. It's just a command line app in python. I could make it open source though. It would be neat to see how other people modify it.
I've a different take. I use a voice diary app that I built (originally for hiking trips) - I take a picture of the ingredients, then record the cooking instructions, and replay this when cooking (the picture shows as background when you play the recording). I add notes about the ingredients, or tags to the recording.
It's easier for me to "listen" to a recipe and pause as needed, vs. to look it up. It's a more casual approach though - no constraint optimisation, or anything like this, but I find it works great for me. Also I can share a recipe this way with someone else by just sharing the recording p2p.
I have been thinking about building something like this also. I work from home and so I open the fridge throughout the day for 3 meals, snack, lunch for kids etc.
And I noticed how much is thrown out despite attempts to not do so, because different items have different shelf life.
Wow this looks like an app i could pay for. How do you score the candidates ? Manually ? How do you not end up with the same reciepies recommended all over again, i.e, do you always use a new mutation to try ?
I live in MA. This is for 2 adults, 1 4-year-old, 1 almost 2-year-old. I should mention, this price does not include the cost of lunches (The school provides lunch, my wife buys lunch at work, and I usually snack throughout the day instead of eating lunch). Next, I don't buy processed or pre-made foods. So I'll snack on nuts instead of chips. It started as a health thing (they're always filled with sugar, and stuff) but i've found it's also saves a bunch of money. I make my own stocks, and sauces. I cook a lot of chicken, and usually I'll buy bone-in thighs. It started as a flavor thing (I find breast meat flavorless) but it's super cost effective. A family pack costs $.99 a pound, so for less than $5 I can get 2 meals worth of chicken, some bones for stock, and some fat for schmaltz. The rest of the savings come from efficiency. My program groups like ingredients, so I have less waste. A cart full of fresh vegetables, some dairy products, a couple family sized proteins, the occasional staple, and a few bonus treats for the kids is super cheap.
My bill also doesn't include alcohol. I've given up drinking mostly to boost my night-time productivity, but I'll buy wine in bulk which I mostly use for cooking, though I might have a glass with dinner.
Within the last year, I started down the route of eating out less and being more conscientious of what I was cooking. Google searches are a pretty good resource for finding recipes with one caveat, you can't store the recipes. I would save my favorites to a folder in my browser, but eventually, that folder became 120+ recipes links and ver time consuming to filter through when I wanted to make something.
I built FeastGenius to solve the problem of finding and organizing all those recipes. With the site, you can do the following.
- Add your own recipes.
- "Clip" recipes from anywhere on the web.
- Find a recipe on the site you like? You can save it to your profile so you can easily find it later.
- Organize recipes into collections and share them with anyone.
- Search from 20,000+ recipes.
- plus filter by calories or macros (if your an iifym nerd like me).
- Find the top trending recipes added to the site.
- Since I'm on reddit way too much I thought it would be fun to use the same algorithm they do for
organizing trending posts.
I would love to hear the feedback from the hackernews community. I'll take the suggestions into consideration as I continue to build.
Some feedback - Clicked on a random soup recipe, it gave a photo, the ingredient list, but for the instructions it wanted me to go to some other site. This is inconvenient and it also carries a real rick of losing the recipe if the external link 404-s (see the LuckyPeach fiasco, for example).
I realize there might be some copyright issues, but for me, as a user, they don't exist when I copy recipes to my own private collection, so I would expect any online version of it to behave the same way. It needs to keep full versions of every recipe and an optional "source" link.
I'm not interested in calorie counting as a central feature, so the way the site functions right now is not dramatically better than just keeping a plain bookmark list.
EDIT - I can formalize my main gripe now.
Above, you describe the site as a way to _organize my recipes_, where in reality it's more of community _index_ of recipe _links_ with some diet-oriented extras. That's the main issue. It doesn't actually do well what you describe at the top, but it does well some other thing that's mentioned at the bottom.
This is a clever website! I like it. One thing that would be nice is letting members directly download some sort of collection / list- preferably with formatting- so that if your site ever goes poof everyone doesn't lose all their data.
That being said, I do like this idea, and will see if I can introduce my mom to the site in a bit.
How do you intend to keep this site alive long-term?
I appreciate the feedback. I'll add it to my list of things to do in the next version of updates. How would you like to get that information, in csv format or something else?
> How do you intend to keep this site alive long-term?
Currently, the site is being hosted on Heroku so I can scale it as needed. I'll likely move it to AWS in the nearish future, but for now, Heroku is doing the trick. As far as longevity goes I do daily DB backups so in the case of an issue I can do a restore. If the site picks up in popularity I could also move to doing hourly backups.
Cool! Will check it out and see if it defeats my own system. Also great you started cooking yourself. It is a great way to relax and be creative. Hard work pays off afterwards:)
Ill write down my way of working, hopefully it inspires you.
My current system is: when i have found and tested a good recipe, i copy/paste it into an email and email to myself, with a headline prefixed with “recipe”, for example “recipe: soto ayam”. Copy pasting recipes is important, as websites blog posts disappear quite often.
Email is always with me, gmail has a very good search engine. Content is free form.
Usually i can just copy/paste (missing) ingredients into the google keep list i share, for groceries, with my better half.
Additionally i can share recipes with her by mailing them, although sharing links would be more convenient.
Will try it out later this week when i probably come up with a never before tried recipe.
The website looks great, love the design and categories.
> "Clip" recipes from anywhere on the web.
I always wondered if recipes would be, like most content, copyrighted. Have you looked into this?
Also, did you try using pen and paper? This sounds silly but when I am fasting, I am get cranky. Writing it down helped me stay focused and not give my self yet another excuse to break the fast.
you are absolutely correct, the instructions for a recipe can be copyrighted. If you use the app you'll notice that when a recipe is clipped, in order to see the instructions you will get directed to the original recipe. I want to do right by creators and make sure they get the full credit deserved.
What the app is concerned with is the ingredients(which is not copyrighted). I can use that for calculating the nutritional content.
Adding recipes into my notebook was the origin of this site. I would write out the ingredients and then look up the nutrition content for each one. So the purpose of feastgenius is to automate that :)
I tried a few similar sites recently and settled on Paprika[1]. Not a big fan of their pricing plan (pay per client) but they work OK otherwise and I think they're probably the most popular in the space.
I use Paprika as well. The most useful feature is that I can add a bunch of recipes to the calendar for a week, and then auto generate a grocery list synced to my phone. You can also easily scale the ingredients. I have a couple of friends who use it and say it clips recipes in foreign languages pretty well (but no ingredient scaling).
There have been a lot of apps in this space which were better but also subsequently abandoned by the developers. Almost all of my friends switched over to Paprika because they got tired of switching again and again.
Paprika has a really nice web clipping feature. Enter a URL, and it extracts the recipe, separating out the ingredients list from the instructions. It will even extract recipe from the comments in Reddit threads. I'll be walking through the OP's site for interesting recipes, and clipping them with Paprika.
Cheftap has this as well, and it works great. Rarely you have to edit it to fix something, since most of the time it pulls it from any website properly.
I have not used paprika myself so unfortunately I cannot comment. But if there are any features that you would like me to focus on for the next updates of feastgenius let me know and I will work them in.
I think the biggest feature for most people is that they don't want it to dissapear after 10 years. Many people put a lot of work into their recipe collection and wants it to be available for the kids when they grow up.
Cool project, I love that you can search by macros. A few points:
1. Clipping recipes from different websites can be quite challenging because of the varying html structures. I recently tackled this problem and I'm curious what method you used to find recipe content within an html page? I ended up checking to see if the website followed a Recipe schema [1] and if not use a mix of heuristics to try identifying if a line of text was an ingredient. I also was considering using machine learning in there, but couldn't figure out a good way to incorporate it.
2. Is there a reason you don't include the instructions of the recipe on your website?
Awesome to see some fresh sites in this space. I built Saffron [2] which is focused on organizing your recipes into digital cookbooks.
For this project, I used Spoonaculars API for clipping recipes. I would be very interested in creating my own, similar to what you did. That would give me more control over the process. Did you come across any open source repos when you worked on your crawler?
> Is there a reason you don't include the instructions of the recipe on your website?
Yes, when users clip recipes from another source I want to make sure that users need to navigate back to the original page to see the instructions. This is to ensure the original author gets credit for it. If a user adds a recipe themselves to the site then it will show the instructions. Here is an example of a recipe with instructions for demo purposes, https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/everything-nice-jerk-chi....
I quite like this - I have one suggestion though. Please convert between US measurements and metric. I much prefer metric and for this reason tend to stick to UK/European websites - but occasionally there will be something on a US website I want to try - having to go through and convert is a chore.
It would also be great to be able to save known substitutions - like sometimes I have to use plain flour and baking powder rather than self-raising because it's what I have in the cupboard.
Speaking as an American, US measurements drive me crazy, especially in baking where packing density can throw things off. I have a coffee scale that is accurate to 0.1 grams and it makes it _so_ much easier to measure everything out.
Having a sliding scale for the number of people you intend to serve would also boost the usability of the site.
Chiming in as another American who prefers metric measurements in the kitchen.
I do a lot of baking (mostly things made of sourdough) and always appreciated that King Arthur offers the conversion on their recipes; So much so that I'll generally check there first. When I'm working out a new recipe from multiple different ones, I convert them all to metric in my own version.
I think the only thing I don't use metric for is <= half a teaspoon, because the measuring spoon is far more efficient than trying to measure out 2g on a kitchen scale that has a minimum of ~2g. And it seems silly to me to break out the scientific scale for a 1/2 tsp of whatever.
Volume conversion to grams would be great for automation. I love how much less dishes there is when you can use the scale for everything. Just zero the scale and pour in flour. Zero again for the butter and so on.
Is it possible to promote some kind of consistency in measuring? My wife disregards a lot of American cooking sites (am based in Australia) because the conversion of cups/teaspoons etc is sometimes open to interpretation and can lead to a disaster.
I cannot understand how anyone puts up with measuring stuff by volume (other than liquids). 1 cup of flour is a hugely variable amount depending on how compressed it is. Don't even get me started on heaped cups. For baking in particular where everything needs to be very precise, it's bonkers to see recipes without weight measurements.
In the US a kitchen scale is a relatively uncommon piece of equipment. I own one, but that's primarily to service what some might call an unhealthy obsession with coffee. Thinking through the kitchens of friends and family, I can only think of one other that is similarly equipped. And that friend shares my coffee hobby.
Some of these friends without scales bake quite a lot, and do a very good job of it. I guess they're doing it on "hard mode" but they acquit themselves very well.
There are "official" ways to fill cups that reduce the variance a bit but you are right. Humidity, pressure and temperature also affect volume more than weight and can throw off a recipe. Plus, scales are O(1) while cups are closer to O(n) (maybe O(log n) if you have many different sizes of cups... and are willing to clean them all...)
Cue all the Americans(who have much bigger kitchens on average) explaining why scales are unnecessary and cups are the one true way.
It's really just a non-issue. Flour could be compressed, but its not really in reality. The minor differences really don't matter much. Of course you can also sift it, which will not only help if it was somehow really heavily compressed but also breaks up clumps.
I believe the suggestion is that many recipes with metric measurements will use grams (measuring mass), while most American recipes use cups/tablespoons/etc. (measuring volume). I've noticed this and have no idea why it's the case.
The publishing industry pushes more and more cookbooks every year, and between traditional cookbooks and more recent YouTube channels, most recipes are much more fantasy entertainment than serious attempts at trying to get people to take more control over how their food is made.
The problem is that cookbook recipes distort the flow of food preparation:
Find an appealing recipe -> look up the necessary ingredients -> buy the ingredients -> take the ingredients home and make the recipe
This motivates people to purchase ingredients which are not in season, i.e. purchasing tomatoes to make tomato salad when tomatoes are not in season. This generates demand for produce which is lacking in flavor and nutrition, with an outsize environmental impact due to being shipped thousands of miles[1].
The proper flow is to go to a local farmer's market -> buy what is local and in-season (with a side benefit that it will be cheap, since the farmer has little control over the date of harvest and everything has to be sold before it rots) and in great quantities -> figure out how to make it once you get home, taking advantage of other produce which is in season, fresh ingredients which are available all year round (i.e. meat, dairy, eggs), and shelf-stable pantry staples.
This flow yields food which is simultaneously tastier and more affordable - but you have to learn how to cook as an independent life skill, and not constantly rely upon recipes.
Depends where you live , there is no local farmer's market here, if we drive there the affordable part of the equation disappears. Some local grown things are available , like mushrooms and they seem to be in season all year. The best and freshest tomatoes have flown a minimum of 10 hours from where they happen to be in season. So , while I agree with your proper flow , the reality is you eat whatever is available near you nevermind where it comes from.
What kind of solutions do you think are possible for this issue? I can totally see your point, but I am unsure how to fix it for a person who really isn't interested in learning tons of recipes for each season.
I think the first flow is still fine, but maybe should just include going local and buying in-season items.
Knowing what you eat is important but I can understand why people are drawn to the easiness of a cookbook filled with recipes from any season.
It's not about learning recipes, it's about learning cooking as a matter of technique - everything from knife skills to the correct temperature for burners (high for boiling water, medium for bringing oil up to temperature, low for simmering sauces) to how to salt and season food for taste. These are simple skills which are generally not covered in recipes (due to their generic applicability) and, honestly, should be taught in high school as part of a home economics course.
> but you have to learn how to cook as an independent life skill, and not constantly rely upon recipes
But don't you have to start by looking at recipes before you have fully acquired this skill? It's not like anyone is born with the ability to know what temperature to cook things at.
Recipes alone are not good for that, you need a systematic course. That, and the fact that most recipe sources try to be interesting, not just "basic pancakes".
Nah, you could totally rely upon recipes and shop only for in season stuff. It'd be trivially easy to if somebody made a seasonally organized cookbook. Getting local only is a little harder, but still not terrible, especially in the digital age.
Readit News
One thing I'm looking forward to adding is tagging recipe steps as do-ahead, mis en place, early, late, and last minute. This will make it a bit easier to think through the mental gantt chart I use when cooking a dinner composed of a bunch of dishes. Also a simple scraping utility for importing.
The thing all these have in common is that they're reactions against the festering cesspool of hostile-UI, low-information-density, pages full of affiliate links that are today's cooking sites. (NYT cooking very much excepted.)
I wish we had a better mechanism for including more people in the project of iteratively refining the way we think about life tasks and improving the tools we use to think with. I think this is a great conversation and wish more people who like to cook could participate.
This is a consistently excellent resource, and I love the many small, essential bits of polish they've applied to their iOS app, like preventing your iPhone's screen from turning off when you're reading a recipe.
The main thing I wanted to optimize was menu planning. So I wrote a genetic algorithm which will generate a menu, add the score, mutate the menu in some way, and iterate. In my database I have a rough price per ingredient, and my families enjoyment of the recipe (though I have kind of a lagging gradient which reduces the score per recipe to prevent duplication). I also have included in my algorithm what I call slots. So something like a lasagna will take 4 slots where as a stir fry will be 1 slot. I sync my schedule and break it down to slots. This allows the algorithm to fit the recipe to the time available. I dont score slots though otherwise short recipes always win.
Since the algorithm optimizes based on the week, but keeps a running inventory it's pretty good at maximizing my grocery bill and family enjoyment. My average grocery bill is between $40-$60 a week. And I cook 5 times a week.
Although my goal was to find recipes that shared ingredients to cut back on wastage. I used a constraint solver (https://developers.google.com/optimization) and asked it to produce 5 recipes requiring the minimum number of ingredients, and was rather amused that the first run included such classics as "boiled egg", "butter potato" and "toast".
Me too, although I'm solving a different problem: organization. I'm not so concerned with cost or nutritional value. In the end I went with a somewhat simpler route: LaTeX (well xelatex). I built a couple document classes, one creates a letter sized document and one creates a 4x6 index card sized document. I used the former to concatenate all the recipes into a master PDF as well. This "master" PDF contains the recipes as well as indexes (by author, by ingredient).
I've tried tablets in the kitchen, but ultimately for me the most convenient thing was to just tape a printout onto a cabinet door and go from there.
YMMV.
It's easier for me to "listen" to a recipe and pause as needed, vs. to look it up. It's a more casual approach though - no constraint optimisation, or anything like this, but I find it works great for me. Also I can share a recipe this way with someone else by just sharing the recording p2p.
And I noticed how much is thrown out despite attempts to not do so, because different items have different shelf life.
My bill also doesn't include alcohol. I've given up drinking mostly to boost my night-time productivity, but I'll buy wine in bulk which I mostly use for cooking, though I might have a glass with dinner.
Rice, flour, beans, lentils, etc should be the bulk of your staples. They are also dirt cheap. Remainder of the money can be used on fresh vegetables.
Within the last year, I started down the route of eating out less and being more conscientious of what I was cooking. Google searches are a pretty good resource for finding recipes with one caveat, you can't store the recipes. I would save my favorites to a folder in my browser, but eventually, that folder became 120+ recipes links and ver time consuming to filter through when I wanted to make something.
I built FeastGenius to solve the problem of finding and organizing all those recipes. With the site, you can do the following.
- Add your own recipes.
- "Clip" recipes from anywhere on the web.
- Find a recipe on the site you like? You can save it to your profile so you can easily find it later.
- Organize recipes into collections and share them with anyone.
- Search from 20,000+ recipes.
- Find the top trending recipes added to the site. I would love to hear the feedback from the hackernews community. I'll take the suggestions into consideration as I continue to build.I realize there might be some copyright issues, but for me, as a user, they don't exist when I copy recipes to my own private collection, so I would expect any online version of it to behave the same way. It needs to keep full versions of every recipe and an optional "source" link.
I'm not interested in calorie counting as a central feature, so the way the site functions right now is not dramatically better than just keeping a plain bookmark list.
EDIT - I can formalize my main gripe now.
Above, you describe the site as a way to _organize my recipes_, where in reality it's more of community _index_ of recipe _links_ with some diet-oriented extras. That's the main issue. It doesn't actually do well what you describe at the top, but it does well some other thing that's mentioned at the bottom.
That being said, I do like this idea, and will see if I can introduce my mom to the site in a bit.
How do you intend to keep this site alive long-term?
> How do you intend to keep this site alive long-term? Currently, the site is being hosted on Heroku so I can scale it as needed. I'll likely move it to AWS in the nearish future, but for now, Heroku is doing the trick. As far as longevity goes I do daily DB backups so in the case of an issue I can do a restore. If the site picks up in popularity I could also move to doing hourly backups.
My current system is: when i have found and tested a good recipe, i copy/paste it into an email and email to myself, with a headline prefixed with “recipe”, for example “recipe: soto ayam”. Copy pasting recipes is important, as websites blog posts disappear quite often.
Email is always with me, gmail has a very good search engine. Content is free form.
Usually i can just copy/paste (missing) ingredients into the google keep list i share, for groceries, with my better half.
Additionally i can share recipes with her by mailing them, although sharing links would be more convenient.
Will try it out later this week when i probably come up with a never before tried recipe.
> "Clip" recipes from anywhere on the web.
I always wondered if recipes would be, like most content, copyrighted. Have you looked into this?
Also, did you try using pen and paper? This sounds silly but when I am fasting, I am get cranky. Writing it down helped me stay focused and not give my self yet another excuse to break the fast.
Edit: Formatting.
How would you compare your service to theirs?
[1] https://www.paprikaapp.com/
There have been a lot of apps in this space which were better but also subsequently abandoned by the developers. Almost all of my friends switched over to Paprika because they got tired of switching again and again.
1. Clipping recipes from different websites can be quite challenging because of the varying html structures. I recently tackled this problem and I'm curious what method you used to find recipe content within an html page? I ended up checking to see if the website followed a Recipe schema [1] and if not use a mix of heuristics to try identifying if a line of text was an ingredient. I also was considering using machine learning in there, but couldn't figure out a good way to incorporate it.
2. Is there a reason you don't include the instructions of the recipe on your website?
Awesome to see some fresh sites in this space. I built Saffron [2] which is focused on organizing your recipes into digital cookbooks.
[1] https://schema.org/Recipe
[2] https://www.mysaffronapp.com/
> Is there a reason you don't include the instructions of the recipe on your website?
Yes, when users clip recipes from another source I want to make sure that users need to navigate back to the original page to see the instructions. This is to ensure the original author gets credit for it. If a user adds a recipe themselves to the site then it will show the instructions. Here is an example of a recipe with instructions for demo purposes, https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/everything-nice-jerk-chi....
I'm working on adding a $5/month subscription.
It would also be great to be able to save known substitutions - like sometimes I have to use plain flour and baking powder rather than self-raising because it's what I have in the cupboard.
Having a sliding scale for the number of people you intend to serve would also boost the usability of the site.
I do a lot of baking (mostly things made of sourdough) and always appreciated that King Arthur offers the conversion on their recipes; So much so that I'll generally check there first. When I'm working out a new recipe from multiple different ones, I convert them all to metric in my own version.
I think the only thing I don't use metric for is <= half a teaspoon, because the measuring spoon is far more efficient than trying to measure out 2g on a kitchen scale that has a minimum of ~2g. And it seems silly to me to break out the scientific scale for a 1/2 tsp of whatever.
Some of these friends without scales bake quite a lot, and do a very good job of it. I guess they're doing it on "hard mode" but they acquit themselves very well.
Cue all the Americans(who have much bigger kitchens on average) explaining why scales are unnecessary and cups are the one true way.
The publishing industry pushes more and more cookbooks every year, and between traditional cookbooks and more recent YouTube channels, most recipes are much more fantasy entertainment than serious attempts at trying to get people to take more control over how their food is made.
The problem is that cookbook recipes distort the flow of food preparation:
Find an appealing recipe -> look up the necessary ingredients -> buy the ingredients -> take the ingredients home and make the recipe
This motivates people to purchase ingredients which are not in season, i.e. purchasing tomatoes to make tomato salad when tomatoes are not in season. This generates demand for produce which is lacking in flavor and nutrition, with an outsize environmental impact due to being shipped thousands of miles[1].
The proper flow is to go to a local farmer's market -> buy what is local and in-season (with a side benefit that it will be cheap, since the farmer has little control over the date of harvest and everything has to be sold before it rots) and in great quantities -> figure out how to make it once you get home, taking advantage of other produce which is in season, fresh ingredients which are available all year round (i.e. meat, dairy, eggs), and shelf-stable pantry staples.
This flow yields food which is simultaneously tastier and more affordable - but you have to learn how to cook as an independent life skill, and not constantly rely upon recipes.
[1] See e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Tomatoland-Industrial-Agriculture-Des...
I think the first flow is still fine, but maybe should just include going local and buying in-season items.
Knowing what you eat is important but I can understand why people are drawn to the easiness of a cookbook filled with recipes from any season.
But don't you have to start by looking at recipes before you have fully acquired this skill? It's not like anyone is born with the ability to know what temperature to cook things at.