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Your Fooder account

You need an account to create and view your recipes. In the menu at the top, go to login/signup and you will be redirected to signup using a Google account. Currently, there is only the option to sign up using a Google account.

Creating a Fooder accounts is free and existing free accounts will remain free forever. You can create up to 100 recipes.

You can delete your account at anytime. Go into your account page from the menu at the top and follow the instructions. please note: deleting you account is irrevirsable, you data is removed from our servers. Therefore, export your data before you do.

Create a recipe

Recipes are the central piece of information in Fooder.

Once you created your account the first thing you see is an empty recipe overview. Click the Add recipe button to create your first recipe.

This will bring you into the recipe form. The form has 5 fields (of which the title is the only mandatory field):

  • Title: The description of the recipe. Can be used for searching the recipes later.
  • Source: If you have a source as a reference for the recipe, you can put that here. In case you select web in the dropdown the source will be a link
  • Tags: By adding tags to a recipe, you can easily find and filter you recipes later. You can add multiple tags to a recipe, just put a comma between the tags.
  • Instructions: This is a free form field; add whatever you feel like in whatever format works best for you to recreate the recipe.
  • Ingredients: List the ingredients for the recipe.

See How I use fooder for some tips how I use Fooder.

Edit a recipe

After you created a recipe, it is easy to make changes to the recipe. Click on [edit] next to the title of the recipe and you are taken to the editing mode of the recipe.

The editing mode is exaclty the same as when you created the recipe, except that all the fields contain the information you added previously. Add, change, remove anything you want and click Save changes.

In case you don't want to save the changes to you made, simply click Discard changes and you are taken back to the recipe view without any changes saved to the recipe.

Adding and removing notes

To add notes to your recipe, scroll down the recipe view to the notes section under the horizontal bar. Fill in the form and click the button Add note. The note(s) will appear above the form in chronological order.

Notes have a maximum length of 250 characters.

You can remove individual notes by clicking the [remove] button next to a note.

Publish a recipe

By default, Fooder lets you create recipes for yourself only. They are private and no-one can access them.

But if you like, you can publish your recipes and let other people use them. Recipes are published anonimously (there is no way to 'sign' a recipe) and without notes.

In order to publish a recipe, go in to the editing mode of the recipe you want to publish and click on the private/public toggle at the bottom of the form. In your recipe list view, a green open lock icon will appear on the left of an item if that recipe is made public.

In the recipe view itself, there is a gray link directly below the recipe title that takes you to the publicly available link. You can't search for public recipes, they are only available through the direct link.

please note: If you decide to make a recipe public, updates you make to that recipe are automatically also published. This means that other users see the recipe as it is at that moment, not at the moment of making the recipe public. Once you make a recipe private again, it is no longer available.

Search for a recipe

At the top of your home screen is a search bar where you can search for keywords in your recipe titles. Simply start typing and the relevant results will show.

In addition, you can select one or more tags to filter the current list of recipes.

At the moment you can't search for public recipes. They are only available with a direct link.

How I use Fooder

There are roughly 4 ways I use Fooder to manage my recipes.

  1. Writing down the whole recipe
  2. The most common scenario. I make/find a new recipe and when I decide want to make it again somewhere in the future I'll add it to Fooder. I think of a simple title, add a source if any and write down a list of ingredients. I usully don't bother with exact measurements at first but I do write down how many portions it will make (exceptions are when I make a large quantity for the freezer). The instructions are not always complete but I write down what I think I need the next time to recreate the recipe. Oftentimes, I come back later to edit the recipe and it is usually for the instructions. I almost always add one more or tags (see below).
  3. For the notes
  4. Sometimes, I'll put a recipe down with the sole purpose of adding notes. For example, fried rice is something I make regurarely and I don't need a recipe for this. However, I do like to keep track of varations (with egg, with kimchi, fish, tips on handling the rice etc) and stuff I learned over time, which I'll put in the notes..
  5. A title as a reminder
  6. This usually happens when I accidentally create some variation or 'new' recipe on my own and think, I need to write this down somewhere otherwise I'll forget this dish exists. In that sense, this category is more a reminder that the recipe exists than the actual content of the recipe (which I oftentimes leave almost blank).
  7. Putting a source down to follow up on later
  8. This usually happens when I find a recipe online (Youtube most of the time) that I would like to try later. I put a somewhat descriptive title and add the link to the source and come back later to review. That doens't mean I always write down the whole recipe later. Sometimes I don't because the source is good enough, there is too much typing involved or I'm not sure yet it is worth the effort. Othertimes, I'm afraid it will disappear (in the case of more obscure blog posts) so I'll make the effort of writing the whole thing down. Over time, recipes in this category will find it's way into one of the above or are deleted.
I have about 50 recipes in my account at the moment and I think the distribution among the 4 categories is about 40% - 25% - 25% - 10%.

Tagging

Tagging is the most important thing I do to keep track of the recipes I have. I use tags almost exclusively when searching for a recipe or for inspiration. Examples of tags that I use are 'freezer' (food that can be prepared and put in the freezer), 'long-prep' (recipes that take a long time to prep), 'basics' (basic recipes, e.g. how to cook lentils, or basic sauces), and 'meals' (complete meals instead of parts of a meal). I often tag recipes wih multiple tags. Out of the almost 50 recipes currently in my account, 1 doens't have a tag (yet).

Export your data

If you want to have all your recipe data available outside Fooder (e.g before deleting your account, or for sharing or for whatever reason), you can create a simple text export.

Go into you account page from the top menu and under account options click the export button. This will take you to a simple page where all your recipes and notes are listed. You can either export the page as a PDF from you browser menu, or copy-paste all the text into Microsoft Word or Google Docs (or any other text program).