Colorful Cravings Recipes

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COLORFUL CRAVINGS

Help — What's here

A quick tour of the interface: what things do and where to find them.

🧭 Top bar: 📖 Recipe Box · 🛒 Shopping List · 🔔 notifications · + New Recipe · your account menu (Profile, Collections, planner, admin tools).

🔎 Search bar: switch between Name, Ingredient and My notes search.

🏷️ Nav chips: categories, plus My Recipes / Liked / Following when signed in.

🎯 Filter pills appear above the grid when a tag/diet/cuisine/search filter is on — click to clear.

🔍 Browsing & discovery

Infinite-scroll catalog with a Featured recipe hero.
Name search (multi-word) and Ingredient search (must contain all chips).
My notes search looks inside your own private notes — so “Farrells” finds every recipe you noted serving them. Only ever your notes.
Filter by tag, diet, or cuisine — click any badge on a recipe.
Sort by Newest or Most Liked; My Recipes / Liked / Following chips.
📖 Recipe Box — the recipes you've chosen to keep. Deliberately separate from Liked: liking says “this is good”, keeping says “I intend to cook this”. Search, categories and sorting all still work inside the box.

🍽️ Recipe page

Serving scaler (½×–4×) rescales amounts & yields live.
Star rating — give any recipe 1 to 5 stars. Everyone's ratings are averaged and shown as stars to the nearest half (4.3 shows as four and a half, not five), with the figure and the number of people who rated it. Your own rating is set separately underneath and can be cleared. Cards show the average too — a recipe nobody has rated yet is marked new rather than as zero stars.
Like; tag, diet & 🌍 cuisine badges (clickable to filter).
📖 Keep puts the recipe in your Recipe Box; Save to collection files it in a cookbook; Add to shopping list sends the ingredients to your list.
👩‍🍳 Cook Mode — a full-screen, hands-free view: one big step at a time (arrow keys or ← →), checkable ingredients at your chosen scale, and the screen is kept awake while you cook. Esc leaves it.
Nutrition panel and Print layout. The with photos tick beside Print controls whether pictures are included; printouts carry the author and original source, dietary tags and nutrition.
📝 My private note — visible only to you, for what you changed or when you last served it. Searchable from the My notes tab in the search bar.
I made this, fork a copy to adapt, and extra step photos. A photo attached to a step is marked 📷 on the recipe (tap it to see it) and shown full size in Cook Mode, on the step it belongs to — which is where “what should this look like by now?” actually gets asked.
Threaded comments (with replies), guest posts, and a Report link.

✏️ Creating & editing

Editor for details, ingredients, steps, image (drag-and-drop with auto-downscaling).
Give a recipe to someone else — open it, press Edit, then Give this recipe to…. It becomes theirs: it shows under their name, counts on their profile, and they can edit or delete it. They are notified. You cannot undo it yourself afterwards — only they, or an admin, can hand it back. Useful when you have typed up a relative's recipe and want it to stand in their name.
Reorder any ingredient or step with the ▲▼ arrows on its row. Worth knowing after an import: a magazine PDF extracts in visual order, so a two-column layout can interleave, and a Reel caption lists things in whatever order the cook typed them. Steps renumber themselves as they move.
Import a recipe — the Import Recipe button above the title. Three ways in, and they behave differently enough to be worth knowing apart:
1. From a web page. Paste the URL (or the page's HTML source) and it reads the standard schema.org recipe data most cooking sites publish — including the photo.
  - About that photo: it is linked from the original site rather than copied here. It shows everywhere in the app, but it will be missing from a printed cookbook — a book needs the picture file itself, and that file stays on their server — and it disappears if that site ever takes it down.
  - The editor says so under the image field. If you are going to print a recipe, open it and upload your own photo first; the cookbook picker also lists which of your chosen recipes would print without one.
2. From a PDF. Read in your browser — the file is never uploaded. It fills the editor for you to check.
  - PDFs often lose fraction glyphs (¼, ½), so any ingredient that arrives without an amount is flagged rather than guessed at.
  - On an iPhone or iPad: after you pick the file its name appears under the button — that is how you know it arrived. Reading starts on its own, and pressing Import does the same thing. If a file comes through empty it is usually in iCloud Drive and not yet on the device; open it once in the Files app, then choose it again.
3. From a handwritten card. A photo or scan is read by an AI. Select up to four photos at once if the recipe continues on the back or over two pages; they are read together as one recipe.
  - This is the one importer that sends your image away, and it cannot check its own work — so treat it as a transcription. Everything lands in the editor, anything the AI was unsure of is listed, and it never invents an amount it couldn't read.
Whichever way it came in, check the order of ingredients and steps afterwards — a two-column magazine layout can interleave, and a Reel caption is in whatever order the cook typed.
Add Tags, Nutrition, Cuisine, and a Draft / Published status.
🧮 Calculate from ingredients estimates nutrition from USDA FoodData Central. Always an estimate — check it before saving.
- How sure it is. Every ingredient gets a confidence, shown separately for the food and the amount, because they fail independently — the right food with a misread quantity is a different problem from the wrong food. Figures that look wrong are flagged outright: an implausible amount, or sodium near a whole day's intake.
- Where an AI helped. If an AI chose which USDA record a food is, that row is marked ✨ AI-chosen. Ones it matched confidently get their own ✨ AI-chosen matches box below, so you can see every one rather than a count. The AI only ever picks which record a food is — it never touches an amount.
- Where it all appears. In the recipe editor, under the nutrition figures, after you press Calculate. It is saved with the recipe, so it is still there next time you edit.
- If you never press it. A brand new recipe with ingredients gets an estimate automatically just after it saves, so the figures are there next time you open it. Only new ones — editing an older recipe never triggers it, because each run spends one of your daily lookups and fixing a typo should not cost you any. If anything matched poorly the message says so, the confidence panel is saved either way, and doubtful ingredients still reach Nutrition matches to check.
- Daily allowance. Each run is one lookup, and the message afterwards tells you how many you have left today. Every member has their own allowance (plus an hourly cap), so one busy afternoon can't use up the whole site's quota. Re-opening a recipe you have already calculated costs nothing — only Recalculate spends another. It resets at midnight UTC.
Category & Cuisine — both can fill themselves in, and both defer to you. Neither will ever overwrite a choice you have made.
- Category, if you leave it blank. It is chosen from the recipe itself — the title first (Cantaloupe Melon Salad is a Salad), and the method when the title does not say (“remove the finished bread from the pan” means Breads).
- When that happens. After the recipe is saved, so saving is never held up waiting for it. The type appears a moment later with its own message, and if it could not pick one it tells you why rather than leaving you guessing.
- Why it is worth having. An uncategorised recipe is invisible to the filter chips and lands at the back of a printed cookbook under Everything else.
- Cuisine starts on ✨ Have AI pick and is suggested as you fill the form — from the title, and from the description and ingredients once you have them. It re-checks when you leave the title, after an ingredient, when diets are re-checked, and once more when you save.
- A choice you make is never overwritten by either of them — not by a later suggestion, and not when you save. Pick — No cuisine — to opt out of cuisine suggestions entirely.
- Either way a suggestion is marked ✨ so you can see it wasn't you, it can only ever be one of this site's own categories or cuisines, and if the AI is unavailable the reason is shown under the field.
Dietary suitability: rule suggestions + optional ✨ AI assist — you confirm what applies.

👥 Social & community

Profiles (bio, avatar, recipe grid, follower counts) and Follow + a Following feed.
Collections / cookbooks (public or private) and a device-saved Shopping list (clearable, and prints in two columns when it gets long).
Make a cookbook builds a proper PDF book from any recipes in the community — your 📖 Recipe Box is pre-ticked, and there is a search box for the rest. It has a title page, a contents page with real page numbers, and optional ruled pages at the back for handwritten recipes.
- Choosing what goes in. Tick any recipes in the community, not only your own. Your Recipe Box starts ticked; the search box finds the rest.
- The cover. Open Cover in the picker to set the title, an optional subtitle and the author(s). Title and subtitle print across the top of the front board, the author along the foot. Author is blank on purpose: a book might be one cook, a couple or a whole family, and that is not something to guess at.
- The cover picture is optional — leave it empty for the house photograph. Your own must be at least 3,019 pixels wide, checked the moment you choose it rather than after the order goes in. How much the picture is darkened behind the title is worked out from the photograph itself, so a dark one keeps its depth and a bright one still reads.
- What you get: two PDFs, a cover and an interior. That is how the printer takes them.
- Recipe page order choices: A–Z by title (the default), by meal (breakfast, mains, sides, puddings…) or by cuisine. The two grouped orders give each section its own opening page, so they make the book a little longer — the picker tells you by how many pages before you build it. Anything without a category or cuisine is gathered at the back under Everything else rather than being left out. Meal and cuisine order follow the sequence an admin sets on Manage Categories and Cuisines, which is the same order as the filter chips above the catalog.
- Ordering a printed copy is under Printed cookbooks in the account menu — see Admin below for how an order is reviewed and sent.
Meal planner — drag recipes between days, copy last week, and build the week's shopping list from the plan.

🔔 Account & notifications

The account menu holds Profile, Collections, Meal planner, Trash, data export, Sign out (and admin tools).
Trash keeps deleted recipes so you can restore them.
Delete account is on your own profile page, beside “Edit profile” — deliberately away from Sign out, and it always asks for confirmation.
The bell alerts you to comments, replies, and new recipes from cooks you follow.

🥗 Diet & cuisine

Vegan Gluten-Free Nut-Free Paleo 🌍 Thai 🌍 Italian

Diet labels are author-indicated guidance — always verify for serious allergies.

The four macro labels, exactly

These four are calculated, not chosen. Once a recipe has nutrition figures, each is worked out from the share of calories coming from each macronutrient — protein and carbohydrate at 4 kcal per gram, fat at 9 — and offered to the author to confirm. They are always per serving.

Label	Applies when	Example, per 400 kcal serving
High-Protein	Protein is 25% or more of calories	25 g protein or more
Low-Carb	Carbohydrate is 26% or less of calories	26 g carbohydrate or less
Low-Fat	Fat is 30% or less of calories	13 g fat or less
Balanced	All three fall in the usual ranges at once — protein 10–35%, carbohydrate 40–65%, fat 20–35%	e.g. 20 g protein · 50 g carbohydrate · 12 g fat

A recipe can carry more than one: a dish at 30% protein and 24% carbohydrate is both High-Protein and Low-Carb, and anything between 20% and 30% fat is both Low-Fat and (if the rest fits) Balanced. A recipe with no nutrition figures gets none of them — that is not a judgement about the food, only that nothing has been worked out yet.

These are this site's own definitions, not legal ones. “Low fat” has a specific meaning on a packaged-food label in the US (3 g or less per serving) and “low carb” has no regulated meaning at all. The thresholds here follow the common share-of-calories convention so recipes can be compared with each other — they are not a nutrition claim, and they are computed from estimates. If you are eating to a target set by a doctor or dietitian, work from the gram figures in the nutrition panel rather than these badges.

🛠️ Admin

Manage categories, choose the Featured recipe, and moderate reported comments.
Edit anyone's recipe. The Edit button appears on every recipe, not just your own. A banner names whose it is, and your changes save under their name — editing does not take a recipe over. An admin can also reassign one to a different member, which is how you rehome the recipes of somebody who has left.
Nutrition matches to check — every ingredient the USDA lookup was unsure about, grouped by wording and counted. The count is the point: the same bad match seen eight times is worth a permanent fix, seen once it is probably an odd line. Each row shows what was actually searched, which is usually what explains a strange match. Dismiss anything you have checked — it comes back if it happens again. Copy for review puts the list on the clipboard as plain text to paste into a chat for a second opinion.
Category order — the ▲▼ arrows on Manage Categories set the order used by the filter chips above the catalog and by the sections of a cookbook printed “by meal”. Put them in the order you’d eat them; a new category starts at the end until you move it. Cuisines carries its own order the same way.
Book printing and orders — Printed cookbooks in the account menu.
- Any member can ask; only an admin sends it to the printer. That release is the step that spends money and cannot be undone from the app.
- What the requester supplies: both PDFs, how many copies, and one address.
- The printing cost appears as they choose — per book and for the whole order — worked out from the page count of the interior attached, so they know what they are asking for before they ask. It excludes shipping and tax, which depend on the address; an admin confirms the real figure with the printer before anything is sent.
- Both files are opened and measured when attached, so attaching them the wrong way round is caught at that moment rather than by an email from the printer days later.
- No card details ever touch this site. The printer bills the account owner directly; this app only records what is owed between members and who marked it settled.
Bugs and enhancements — members raise them from Report a bug or enhancement in the account menu. Tick show everyone's to work the queue: Accept, or Reject with a reason. The reason is required and the person who raised it sees it, which is what keeps people reporting things. You can reopen a decision you have changed your mind about.

Colorful Cravings

Recipe

Ingredients

All Recipes

New Recipe

Details

Ingredients

Instructions

Nutrition (per serving, optional)

Photos

Dietary suitability

My Collections

Report Moderation

Members & Invites

Invite someone

Nutrition lookups (USDA)

Awaiting approval

All members

Outstanding invites

Trash

Meal Planner

Printed cookbooks

Where it ships

The two files

Report a bug or suggest an enhancement

My reports

Nutrition matches to check

Manage Categories

All Recipes

New Recipe

Details

Ingredients

Instructions

Nutrition (per serving, optional)

Photos

Dietary suitability

My Collections

Report Moderation

Members & Invites

Invite someone

Nutrition lookups (USDA)

Awaiting approval

All members

Outstanding invites

Trash

Meal Planner

Printed cookbooks

Where it ships

The two files

Report a bug or suggest an enhancement

My reports

Nutrition matches to check

Manage Categories

Welcome back

Account created

Help — What's here

🔍 Browsing & discovery

🍽️ Recipe page

✏️ Creating & editing

👥 Social & community

🔔 Account & notifications

🥗 Diet & cuisine

The four macro labels, exactly

🛠️ Admin

Add to this day

Give this recipe away

Make my cookbook

Add to meal plan

You made this!

Please confirm

Shopping List

Save to Collection

Report Comment

Import Recipe

Delete your account