In October 2020 I set about getting my assortment of recipes online in Markdown format. tl;dr checkout recipes.priddle.xyz, this sauce, and that sauce.

When I was a little boy, nothing was better on those cold upstate NY mornings than a piping hot bowl of Jekyll…

Anyway, I had been printing recipes on 6x4 inch index cards and keeping them in a nice wooden box on my kitchen counter. I had a really complicated Pages.app template for printing them on Avery card stock that had 2 cards per page. Each Pages document had 2 recipes in it. As I’d collect more recipes, I’d dutifully add or update a new document.

This worked to fill that little wooden box, but it sucked whenever I’d need to reprint a card (either to share with someone or because I dripped food/water on it). We also often had to send pictures or copy the text from a card into our phones to share recipes with people.

While I really liked the cards, I knew this thing needed a website, and recipes.priddle.xyz was born.

First, I came up with a simple format to contain all of my recipes in Markdown:

# Title

## Ingredients

Symbols
¼ ½ ¾ ⅓ ⅔ ⅕ ⅖ ⅗ ⅘ ⅙ ⅚ ⅛ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞ →
°

## Directions

How to cook it goes here.

I keep a copy of this right in recipes/TEMPLATE.md to copy from whenever I add a new recipe. It is handy to have the symbols right there for measurements and degrees.

A custom Jekyll build script iterates through all of the recipe Markdown files in recipes/* and generates 2 new files (the HTML file itself that one would view on the web is generated by Jekyll itself).

.txt: I just copy the raw markdown file to a text file. I honestly wanted to use .md so I could link to /recipes/blah.md, but GitHub Pages didn’t like that.

.pdf: I use Prawn to generate a pdf card for each recipe. One column is the ## Ingredients section from the recipe, the other is the ## Directions section. I can also toss a --- in the Directions section if a recipe runs long, and the PDF will have a 2nd page added.

The best part of this is that I can quickly pull up any recipe on my phone if I need to — and we ended up sending a few people recipes over the holidays. I’ve actually been using the recipe cards a bit less now that I can just pull up things on my phone quickly. I do still like the cards for complicated recipes.

Another unexpected surprise this is that I was able to get the PDFs to print from my printer right on single 6x4 cards without too much trouble. Now, I just throw a recipe in a new .md file, push to GitHub, and download a PDF.

I hope that if you’ve stumbled across this post, you’ll give it a try yourself! Just clone the repo and add your own recipe cards. You’ll just need to setup a token for GitHub Actions as outlined at fabacab/jekyll-builder-for-github-pages-action but you should be up and running within an hour or so.