Techy shopping list creator

pledgeX

I hate food shopping. As a result I plan my shops military style and plan exactly what meals I’ll be cooking and when. Then I make a list which includes everything I need so that the only reason I have to go to the shops is to grab things I’ll run out of (milk) or fresh foods that won’t last a month. The problem with this is that writing the list takes ages.

So I’m going to create a techie solution. What I want is all my recipes in a checklist form. When I do my monthly shop I simply run through the list, tick the recipes I like the sound of, then it automatically dumps all the ingredients and at what quantity into a text file that I can print out. Obviously this will take a while to setup as I’ll need to enter all the ingredients and quantities for all my recipes. But once that’s done it shouldn’t really need tweaking unless I pick up the odd new recipe.

So onto the technical gubbins; what would be the best way to achieve this? I imagine this might be a bit too complex for a spreadsheet, and I’m not familiar with macros. Maybe some form of database? I also know some C and am trying to learn C# so perhaps I could incorporate this? Any suggestions?

By the way, I know this is incredibly anal. And no, online shopping is no better imo!

**Edit - Doh, spelt techie wrong in the title

Toxteth_OGrady

Something like this was done on Dragons' Den a while back - might do what you need. Either select an existing or create a new recipe then click 'Add to Shopping' and it gives you a shopping list of the ingredients/amounts you need. If you prefer you can then click through to order from Tesco.

http://www.mydish.co.uk/

pledgeX

Thanks, that's a really good website. Two concerns with that though:
- If the website disappears or breaks I'm back to square one
- 90% of my recipes are from the bbc good food site. I don't want to take credit for recipes that aren't mine or have any kind of copyright issues.

Oh, and I don't learn anything if I do it that way, but that's not a big problem

VoucherMan

I'd have thought it would be quite a simple spreadsheet.

Recipes along the top. Ingredients on the left. Multiply quantities & apply a filter to remove zero quantities.


Might be more of a challenge if you wanted to keep a record of stock levels so that the list only showed items you'd actually be short of.