My Cupboard

RichardSmallTigard

How about a new tab titled 'My Cupboard'. Give us the ability to fill this tab with the foods we purchase and have in our own cupboards. By adding this tab to the meal logging system, it would give us the ability to log snacks, new recipes, etc. using the ingredients already found in our house. When we are adding a new recipe, you would check My Cupboard first for ingredients and use them if they exist. In this way we would gain a lot of consistency in our use of your system.

Presently, if I type 'hamburger 80' I get a list of 98 entries, with calories measured in pounds, ounces, grams and patties. It would be so much easier if you just responded with the My Cupboard entry I previously made that describes the pound of hamburger sitting in my refrigerator (this is the only hamburger I am going to use in this recipe).

A bit more complicated but easier for the end user when entering recipes would be a drop-down list of My Cupboard ingredients with the ability to check a box next to all the ingredients for the recipe. That way I could enter every meat, vegetable, fruit, condiment, spice, etc. in My Cupboard and be able to enter 99% of all recipes I will ever need. If I purchase specialty items, I can enter them into My Cupboard before entering the recipe and then that list would contain 100% of the ingredients. My, what a timesaver that would be.

KareninCanada

You could create all of those food items and then they would show under My Foods.

Unfortunately you can't use specifically that food list to build a recipe from (a sad oversight).

RichardSmallTigard

Somebody has already invested a lot of energy getting the data for everything in my cupboard, so I am not much interested in duplicating what they already did. It would be so much easier to simply select ONCE all the things I regularly buy and put on my shelves and use that for all the entries that follow.

RichardSmallTigard

Let me explain my suggestion in another way that might be easier to visualize.

Imagine a system where I can go shopping in the computer and select everything I have in my house to eat. That would include meats, veggies, fruits, grains, condiments, spices... you name it...

I decide to 'go shopping' so I click on the My Cupboard tab and ADD.

Then I type in the search bar 'Heinz Ketchup'. Up pops the choices that match and I select the one I have sitting there beside my elbow and SAVE.

Then I type in the search bar 'Winco Extra Large Egg' and up pops all the entries that match.

I select the ones I buy and keep going down the list adding the ciabatta rolls, green lettuce, frozen shrimp, Cosmic Crisp apples, flavored popsicles, pepperoncini, salt free butter, hot wings sauce and so on.

From that time on, if I want to enter a recipe for homemade hamburgers all I do is click RECIPES and a new tab appears called My Cupboard (the existing tabs are still there... just a new one added next to them). All the ingredients for my hamburgers will be found on this tab.

If I want to have a snack in the afternoon I can click Add Food and Snack and select the My Cupboard tab. Sure enough, there are the popsicles I have in the freezer so I just click it and SAVE.

In this manner, I can invest the time to enter everything once and never have to do it again. From then on I just click the My Cupboard tab and start selecting the food that I have on my shelves or in the fridge. In this way, the eggs I add to one recipe are the same eggs I add in the other recipes and the nutrition values stay the same. No more scrolling up and down trying to find the closest match for all the future entries.

By simply adding a new tab those people who are completely satisfied with the current system can happily continue doing what they are doing, but people who want to improve their entries and make them a lot more consistent can use the new tab.

So easy. So fast. So consistent. So convenient.