A home-cooking recipe book
One hundred Peruvian home recipes with household measures — cups, spoonfuls, cloves of garlic — and a week that fills itself in with one tap.
Mi semana already existed, but it lacked the most important thing for someone who cooks every day: real recipes. I wrote a new recipe book of one hundred Peruvian home-cooking dishes, with steps, a photo, and meal slots that make sense in a Peruvian household: dessert can also go with lunch, a drink goes with every meal, a main course can show up at dinner.
The hidden challenge was measurements. Nobody cooks in grams. You cook with “a cup and a half of rice,” “two cloves of garlic,” “a bunch of cilantro.” But a shopping list needs to know how much to buy, in packages and kilos. I had to build the equivalence between the two ways of speaking for a hundred and sixty ingredients of Peruvian cooking, so the recipe reads the way people cook and the list comes out the way people shop.
With the recipes in place came the feature that saves someone the most time: “Build my week.” One tap fills the week; another swaps a dish; another repeats last week. With a simple rule that a real kitchen asked for: a recipe doesn’t repeat twice on the same day, and there aren’t two desserts in a single day.
Recipes use ingredients, and ingredients live in the catalog. That’s where something I’d put off was waiting: what it means for “milk” to be a single thing.