A way to fully manage a kitchen

I'm tired of being sold the latest app that will improve my life. I'm tired of feeling overwhelmed with options and too tired to figure out cooking.

So I'm building a thing - an app - in the hopes that I can create the tool that I need in my life. A kitchen grimoire of my very own.

The first step is gathering recipes, figuring out their constituent ingredients, and using a food classification system to building a relational database that allows an app to narrow down recipe choices dynamically based on filter selections.

I was unable to easily access a classification system from the US Food and Drug Administration, but the Eurpoean Food Safety Authority has very thorough documentation of their classification and description system, FoodEx2. More information can be found here of on the EFSA website.

I have also started building a robot to index recipe websites so a scraping bot can go in and focus on the information that is relevant - the ingredients, quantity, and preparation needed in a recipe. Python is especially suited for this, since it has a library, Scrapy, that is quick execute and easy to understand and customize. ScrapingBee.com has an excellent tutorial to get started.

Unfortunately, the EFSA tool that was recommended is built in Java, not Python, and I have not used Java in years. However, the data is downloadable as an .ecf file, which Python should be able to handle if Java is able. The fear is that the .ecf file is a proprietary EFSA file type and whether I'll be able to use it. Ultimately, the data needs to be put into the MariaDB setup I've put together.

Until next time

hyfy