Kptncook is a popular app attempting to answer the infamous "What do you want to cook today?" question. The recipes and the design of the app are good. The technical implementation is a little bit wonky but sufficient.

But what if you want to store some additional information on a recipe? Or generate a grocery list from a recipe or include recipes from other sources? While kptncook is great as a source of inspiration, it is not possible to use it as a recipe manager. And it's also difficult to add recipes from kptncook to a real recipe manager like paprika since the URLs generated by kptncook don't include enough details to be useful.

But somehow the kptncook app can extract those details from a shared recipe URL, so it's probably possible to scrape those details using only the recipe id. This is what kptncook does, a small command line client I wrote earlier this year. At about the same time, someone recommended Mealie to me, a powerful recipe manager using fastAPI in the backend and Vue.js in the front end, a stack I'm familiar with. So I thought: Hmm, maybe it's possible to just import all of my kptncook recipes into Mealie?

And yes, that's an additional thing the kptncook CLI app does now. But until this weekend it was limited to just one image per recipe and the ingredients were not properly transferred and therefore it was not possible to increase the number of portions in mealie etc.

This has all changed now due to this pull request by Alexander Detsch providing per-step images and improved information about food/ingredients. One of the especially useful tricks was to modify the headers of the request sent to the kptncook API to get a more detailed recipe. Thanks a lot 🙏.