Recipe Ingredients Feature Improvement

More continous improvements at Family Recipe Central

While some of the adjustments, fixes and enhancements that we make at Family Recipe Central might seem small and insignificant, sometimes these minor improvements make a big difference for our users.

One of the frequent questions submitted to our support team is "how to have duplicate ingredient items" in the ingredients section of a recipe. Seems reasonable enough, but this has been a limitation in our system up until now.

For example, let's say you have a recipe that has two sections, a fish preparation, and a sauce that is served over the fish. You might want your ingredients list to look something like this ...

Ingredients

Fish

• 2 halibut filets
• 1/2 med onion, diced
• 1/2 cup cilantro, chopped
• 1/4 tsp sea salt
• 1 leek, diced

Sauce

• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp fresh ginger, minced
• 2 tbsp rice wine vingegar
• 1/2 tsp sea salt

Previously, the problem that you would bump into has been our limitation on duplicate ingredients. In this case, the sea salt in the Sauce section is flagged as an error because it's a duplicate ingredient entry of the sea salt in the Fish section.

The recommended work around has been to append minor differences in the ingredient entry to overcome the duplicate limitation. We usually suggest appending asterisks as follows:

Fish

• 2 halibut filets
• 1/2 med onion, diced
• 1/2 cup cilantro, chopped
• 1/4 tsp sea salt *
• 1 leek, diced

Sauce

• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp fresh ginger, minced
• 2 tbsp rice wine vingegar
• 1/2 tsp sea salt **

The single asterisk on the first sea salt entry differentiates it from the sea salt entry with two asterisks on the second entry. This works OK, but at best, is a little awkward.

We've been preparing an update release that will provide a number of enhancements to the recipe editing and management area (including the ability to have duplicate ingredient entries), but it may be a while before this release becomes available (overall, a collection of some pretty fancy stuff we're working on).

In the meantime, we felt we couldn't hold off any longer, and decided to go ahead and improve the current recipe ingredients list to allow duplicate entries.

While seemingly a minor improvement, we hope this will make the user experience just a little bit better for our members. We continue to work hard to make Family Recipe Central the best place to manage your recipes and cookbooks online.