Every recipe app is a hostage situation

You put your recipes in an app. The app is nice. Then it gets acquired, or adds a subscription, or the export button gives you a JSON blob with the ingredients as one unparseable string. Meanwhile the recipes themselves — the actual thing you cared about, some of them from people who aren’t around to ask again — are inside somebody’s product decisions.

recipe-card-maker is the boring fix. The recipes are markdown files. That’s the whole storage layer. One file per recipe, YAML frontmatter for metadata, the body for the method. No database, no service, no account.

If every tool I wrote for it vanished tomorrow, I’d still have a folder of readable text files, and so would anyone I gave a copy to.

Two things to print

Files are the source of truth, but you don’t cook off a text editor. A small Python toolchain turns each recipe into two artifacts:

• A letter-size page for the kitchen binder — the one that goes on the counter and gets flour on it.
• A 4×6 card for the recipe tin, because some recipes want to live in the tin.

Same source, two layouts. Change the recipe once and rebuild.

It also regenerates the collection index — categories, counts, cuisine, difficulty, active time, a tag cloud — straight from the frontmatter. The README you land on in the repo isn’t hand-maintained; it’s built. An index that’s generated stays true, and an index you update by hand stays true for about three weeks.

In-house frontmatter parser, reportlab for the PDF layout. Rebuild everything with make, or one recipe at a time while you’re iterating on it.

Honest status

The toolchain works. The collection is two recipes.

Sun and Moon cookies and an Erdbeertorte, both German, both from the konditorei end of things. That’s not a soft launch, that’s just where it is — I built the machine before I fed it, which is a very software-person way to approach a recipe box and I’m at peace with it.

The corpus is the long game. Markdown recipes with structured frontmatter are a decent substrate for other things later — a web app, a phone app on the couch, a shopping list generator that actually understands quantities. None of that exists. But none of it needs the storage format to change, which was the point of picking plain files in the first place.

Right now it prints a very nice Erdbeertorte card. Start somewhere.