When life gets busy, the first thing my husband and I drop is adequate meal planning. Dinners of pasta, frozen foods, takeout, or even breakfast cereal become frighteningly common. The last time we reflected on our regrettable habits, we recalled that we have tons of easy "go-to" recipes that we could be cooking. The problem lies in: 1) recalling such recipes when we're stressed out, and 2) picking a few and buying groceries for them.
As I type this, I'm feeling how pathetic it sounds... but that's where we are, folks. With my husband busy with professional projects and myself seven months pregnant, we are on the cusp of another Dark Age, culinarily speaking. We need a solution (and as soon-to-be parents, we should probably get this stuff figured out).
Nerd that I am, my mind immediately went to writing some kind of program to handle all of this for us. (If you recall the Outfit-o-Tron 5000, you're probably not surprised) So, I decided to hone my R Shiny skills and build a simple application.
I slapped together a quick prototype and will be editing this post with updates as I add and refine features. Right now, it's pretty bare-bones, but the plan is to add support for ingredients and shopping-list building, and maybe even allow users to link to online recipes.
Link to the app is below. For the underlying code, check out my Github repo.