Feature Request: Quick Entry of Recipe Ingredients Topic

TomDibble 03/30/18
I use a lot of recipes off the web. I have a nice little recipe manager (Paprika Recipe Manager) that I use to download and house them, which treats the ingredients list semi-intelligently (that is, it just takes it in as a big text field one item per line, and from there can give me a grocery list based on what I have told it I have in the house, and scale or convert units etc). But, of course, they don't do anything at all with the ingredient itself - it is just arbitrary text identifier to the app, not associated with any kind of nutritional data etc.

I have also come across another web-based utility which takes a similar list of ingredients and walks you through matching the ingredient text to something in its database, all to end up computing the nutrition data. The problem with that utility is that their food database is horrible - inaccurate *and* highly incomplete.

The reason I (strongly) recommend MyNetDiary to my friends and coworkers is that it has a top-notch food database, with user contributions which are clearly labeled as such, and a proven commitment to keeping their data up to date (I know I've sent in corrected food labels a few times, and am always a little thrilled to see the food database updated the next time I search for the same food a few days later). Which is to say, if any tool could provide what I am asking for, it really would have to be MyNetDiary. You're my only hope!

I'd like to see a similar flow supported in MyNetDiary, at least on the web version. That is, if I take a big ingredients list like this:

2 eggs
5 tablespoons truvia artificial sweetener (about 20 packets)
2 cups heavy whipping cream
2 cups Almond Milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tbsp glycerin

(From Perfect Low Carb Sugar Free Vanilla Ice Cream, slightly modified)

... then I'd want MyNetDiary to give me a grid of 7 rows, where each row has a field for the amount ("2" or "5"), units ("eggs" or "tablespoons"), raw ingredient name ("eggs" or "truvia artificial sweetener (about 20 packets)"), then a drop-down to match that ingredient with an ingredient from the database - ideally remembering what I match things to so that I don't need to find my particular brand of olive oil or soy sauce for every recipe. Maybe allow me to correct the "raw ingredient name" to make it more standardized (ex, change "truvia artificial sweetener (about 20 packets)" to "Truvia"), although I could do that before pasting it in too.

This would *GREATLY* speed up using MyNetDiary to hold recipe nutritional data, and honestly would let me get a much better idea of what I'm actually going to be throwing together before I even set foot in the kitchen (since it would be mostly a cut-and-paste to look at the nutrition facts using my brands, of any random recipe on the net). Tonight for instance I spent over a half hour of mousing around clicking in the four new recipes we made for dinner (it was "Chinese Food Night" so we found three main dishes and a fried rice recipe all which sounded good and were nutritionally right for us and had a big old cooking party ... then afterwards I started transcribing the recipes into MyNetDiary so I could tell everyone - a little too late - exactly what they ate; fortunately our specific ingredients and on-the-fly substitutions actually made the results nutritionally better than they started!) So, I think that this feature would be a *MASSIVE* time saver for any users of MyNetDiary who use the recipe feature.

I should also say that having such a feature in MyNetDiary would be a great promotional opportunity. I run across "but what is the nutritional contents of this recipe if I substitute X" very often in recipe comment sections, and have stumbled across apologetic pointing to the very-imperfect tool above, or "just go enter it into My Fitness Pal" suggestions very often. Giving us an opportunity to evangelize MyNetDiary in such forums ("Just copy it into a MyNetDiary recipe and it will calculate all that for you automatically") would be a great viral marketing tool.

For bonus points, I know this is a long shot, but integrating with one of the leading recipe apps (especially if that is Paprika, since I love that little app!) would be super-fabulous. But, I know, that's asking for a whole business partnership and so probably won't ever happen. But I can dream, can't I?

(BTW, completely off topic, but I am down 50 pounds since this time last year, back in the "normal" weight range for my height/age/gender for the first time since I think at least the late 1990s, and I attribute a lot of that to the excellent tools MyNetDiary gives, so thank you!)

Feature Request: Quick Entry of Recipe Ingredients