Week 3: More Than Ingredients

52 Projects in 52 Weeks | October 18, 2026

My Mom had a collection of recipes in binders and recipe boxes. Handwritten cards, clippings, recipes passed down from family members and friends, and others collected over the years. They’re little pieces of family history collaged together in a binder.

My Aunt Carol has been looking for some of Grandma’s recipe cards; unfortunately those still evade me. And there’s always Uncle Will’s (or was it Seth’s?) molasses raisin cookies. I found three versions of that sacred family recipe, all with slightly different measurements, that happens when you cut down a commercial recipe that starts with 5 pounds of flour. Those “grandma cookies” are a currency worth more than money at my house around the holidays.

And then there’s Mr. Prisk’s pumpkin cookie recipe. I copied it by hand as a teenager, later added chocolate chips and apparently baking details, and my mom adjusted the recipe so it would feed more than one Rob, and later halved the cinnamon and added nutmeg. The card disappeared for decades, until I went through her dessert binder page by page and finally found it, folded up with the recipe facing inward.

I made a batch for a cookie exchange at AdAdapted, where they were a hit. A photo of that old recipe card, complete with two graffitied swans (one sporting a mohawk and a sick hipster beard, the other a lady swan with a pompadour) eventually found its way back to my friend Robb.

Turns out a recipe is a lot more than ingredients too.

Every recipe has a story. Some are in ALL CAPS. 👑

I love this stuff, this is human. (I misspelled vanilla…)

A recipe might start with one person, get passed along to someone else, and eventually become part of another family’s traditions. Along the way it changes. Someone swaps an ingredient, adjusts the measurements, or just figures out a better way to make it for them.

Cod piccata had become a little too regular in the dinner rotation, so this summer you went looking for something different and landed on cod Veracruz.

I found two recipes and took what I liked about both, and mashed that up with a Veracruz special I had at old Knight’s here in Ann Arbor.

At least I don’t hand write in ALL CAPS anymore…

And I’ve even invented a few recipes of my own, including Skeeter’s Chicago Hot BBQ Pulled Pork.

Who is Skeeter? That’s a tale I will only tell over a beer!

The recipe itself matters, of course. But sometimes the story of where it came from matters too

Unfortunately, our modern system for keeping and sharing recipes is kind of a mess. At least my family’s was.

Some are in old recipe boxes. Others are in cookbooks, text messages, Facebook posts, Instagram, Pinterest, or buried on somebody’s cooking website.

Someone asks, “Do you have that recipe?”

Sure. Somewhere. For my mom, these binders and card boxes was that somewhere.

Maybe I can find the link. Maybe I took a picture of the card. Maybe I posted it on Facebook three years ago. And even if I do find it, the person on the other end may have to fight through ads and somebody’s life story before they can figure out how much garlic goes into dinner.

As the saying on Shark Tank goes, there has to be a better way!

A digital recipe binder. With friends.

For Week 3 of my 52 Projects in 52 Weeks experiment, I’m going to try building a social recipe-sharing website.

The idea is pretty simple. I want people to be able to create, collect, organize, and share recipes with each other.

If Aunt Carol wants one of Grandma’s recipes, I should be able to send her a link. She opens it and there’s the recipe. No login required. No scavenger hunt.

If Sherry discovers something interesting on a cooking website or social media, she should be able to save it to her own recipe collection and find it again later when she’s ready for me to make dinner.

And if someone wants to share an old handwritten recipe card, I’d like to preserve the original image and the story behind it, not just strip it down to ingredients and directions.

I also want the actual cooking experience to be simple. When I’m standing in the kitchen with messy hands, I don’t need six printed pages or my phone covered in who-knows-what. I just need to know what goes in the pan next.

I’d like people to be able to follow creators whose recipes they enjoy, save the recipes they like, and maybe answer one simple question after making something:

Would you make it again?

That seems a lot more useful than knowing how many people clicked a little heart.

Of course, my brain has already taken this much further.

What if recipes could have their own lineage, like with the different pens and handwriting on that pumpkin cookie recipe, showing how one person’s original evolved into somebody else’s? What if people could create collections and share them with family and friends? What if good home cooks and food bloggers could build a following, and maybe even make a little mailbox money from their creations?

See what happened there?

I started with Grandma’s recipe box and somehow ended up designing a social network for recipes.

What can I build in a week?

By Saturday, October 24, I’d like to have a working website where someone can enter or import a recipe, save it, share it, and actually cook from it.

It should work well on a phone, because that’s probably where someone will use it in the kitchen. People should be able to print a clean copy too.

The more immediate challenge is getting the thing in front of a real person.

One lesson from the first two projects is that I can spend an extraordinary amount of time making something work exactly the way I imagine it. That’s fun, but it doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve made something useful to anyone else. I dug into that a bit with Load Goblin too: sure, I thought it was fun, but would anybody else?

So this week I want to change the workflow a little. Rather than spending most of the week building and then showing everyone the result on Saturday, I want to get a simple working version in front of someone else as early as tomorrow, Tuesday at the latest.

That means moving pretty damn fast.

Good thing I have been sharpening my axe. Documenting what works, what hasn’t, trying to adapt how I work with Thit to make things easier this time, and next, like an avalanche of improvements I keep bringing forward each week. I will share some of this stuff in my weekly update posts.

What could possibly go wrong?

As I already mentioned above, scope creep is probably the biggest danger.

Or I could build something technically impressive but so cumbersome that nobody bothers using it.

I’ve done that before. Ask CeeCee.

There are some nuances worth thinking about from the beginning, even if the bigger social features come later.

But there’s a more fundamental question: Does anyone actually need another place to save recipes?

Maybe not, but I haven’t found one that ticks my boxes, none of the ones I have experimented with has made the simple act of sharing Grandma’s recipe with Aunt Carol feel particularly natural.

And I think there’s something worth exploring in that.

How should the story end?

I’d love for this to become something people actually use to connect with each other through food.

Not just to collect recipes, but to share a little of themselves. A favorite meal. A family tradition. Something they invented. Something they learned from someone else.

It would be pretty cool to discover that two people had connected over the joy of making food, because of something thwe built.

I don’t expect to prove that in seven days.

Something working tomorrow… thwe better get cracking!

Good thing the Lions have a bye this week.