Vanilla Cookbook

Vanilla Cookbook is a lightweight self-hosted recipe manager focused on simplicity and minimal user work. It provides recipe scraping and parsing, unit conversion, recipe scaling, shopping lists and cooking logs, with optional LLM-powered assistants for recipe analysis and generation.

Key Features

• Smart ingredient parsing with multi-language support and unit conversion between US, imperial and metric (including fractions and temperature conversion)
• Recipe scraping from hundreds of sites via bookmarklet or URL paste, with HTML fallback parsing
• LLM Assist integration supporting multiple providers for scrape assist, text/image analysis, recipe tweaks, summarization and generation (requires API key)
• Recipe scaling, shopping list creation, and cooking logs with calendar view
• User authentication with configurable registration and public recipe sharing
• Automated database backups for Docker installs with scheduled and pre-migration backups and configurable retention
• Progressive Web App support for mobile install and share-to-parse workflows

Use Cases

• Personal cookbook: collect, clean and organize recipes scraped from the web or added manually
• Meal planning and shopping: scale recipes and generate shopping lists for planned meals
• Recipe experimentation: use LLM features to refactor directions, tidy messy ingredients, or generate new recipes from prompts

Limitations and Considerations

• LLM features require supplying API keys and may incur usage costs; functionality depends on the chosen provider
• Local development requires native build toolchain for dependencies like better-sqlite3
• Scraping/parsing may fail on some websites or non-standard recipe markup and may require manual cleanup

Vanilla Cookbook offers a focused, uncluttered interface for managing recipes with practical features for everyday cooking and optional AI enhancements. It is designed for easy Docker deployment and local hosting.