Zheoni
Mise en place steps
I was reviewing recent updates to the spec, and saw something interesting buried in the proposal. In particular, this bit (under "Mobile applications"), emphasis mine:
Mobile apps will need UI adjustments to extra ingredient information in the recipe details. Also it would be beneficial to add an extra cooking step before all the steps where we request the user to gather and prepare required ingredients.
I was wondering if there was any desire for this in Chef, before I start poking around looking to perhaps add it. Right now (IMO) the display for the parenthesized preparations isn't as helpful to the way I parse things visually as it could be.
(By the way, if this project had a discussions tab, I would have used that for this, as I don't think it appropriately falls under "Issues").
I agree that the current way of showing the ingredient notes (mise en place) is not the best. But I'm not sure how I want to show it.
If you want to do a mockup as a suggestion it would be great, but don't worry about making a PR now because I won't accept any new features. Right now I'm working on the cooklang-rs parser and after that I will start a big needed rewrite of the chef server. Until then, no new features.
Also, we can keep this conversation here, but I have just opened the discussions tab 😄
Thanks for the response!
Understood in regards to the feature freeze. Do you have any idea of an ETA for the rewrite at this time?
I'm currently making a bit push to get my recipes into cooklang and in its current state, I'm finding Chef is a fantastic way to view them. I greatly prefer it to the cookcli web server. As I do, I'm keeping my eyes open for improvements and ways to contribute. I've not done mockups before, but I'll see if I can envision something and add it here.
I will say, the big hurdle in my opinion is that the language used to describe an ingredient's preparation seems insufficient to generate steps in a natural-sounding way. Like, @garlic{4%cloves}(crushed) is great for an ingredients list, but less helpful if one wants to auto-generate a step to do such preparations. We can't reasonably translate states like "crushed" into a step like "crush garlic".
So the best I can imagine (which I'll try and mock up) is taking everything that has a preparation tag and create a section between ingredients and method, perhaps called "Preparation" or something. In that section would be something along the lines of "prepare the following ingredients", and then an unordered list of them?
That said, I wonder if this is too complex a problem to solve this way. There are probably a lot of edge cases. Ordering sometimes matters, for example. i.e. the first thing I do is start boiling water, because that takes the longest. To be truly explicit, the preparation should happen in steps as written by the recipe author. It just seems like such a shame to not be able to make the most of what really is a lovely syntax for preparation.
For what it's worth, a more immediate (perhaps during your rewrite) thing that could happen to the preparations is to make them stand out less. I'm not sure if it's just me, but my eyes tend to discard things that are super highlighted like that. I find the way things are spaced in the CLI representation to be more helpful to me anyway -- separate, but on the same line as the ingredient.
Unfortunately there is no estimated time. I don't want to feel under time pressure with chef.