Access/Paradox/Excel help? (or a Recipe Program)

[The Jade Knight]

Okay, so I've got a crazy and ambitious idea, but I need some help.

Does anyone either:
a) know of a free program or website that will allow you to input the ingredients you have, and then will match them to recipes (either recipes already there, or recipes you input) that you have the ingredients for.

b) knows enough about Paradox, Access, or Excel, to help me construct such a thing myself.  I have a real rudamentary knowledge of all three, but not enough to be able to figure out how to do this sort of thing.


Thanks.  It'd save Ari and I loads of time in the long run.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

I would actually much rather do it in MySQL and have a php interface for it, which is how I'm coding my database of music.

what exactly are you doing? just dumping them into a db?
I'd have fields in access for preptime, ingredients, cooking time, overall time, and instructions
Then you can search on partial field matches if you need to.

Spriggo's better at this sort of thing than me, but I'm not going to volunteer him, and it sounds like what you're doing is relatively simple. I could code something.

[The Jade Knight]

I'd have fields in access for preptime, ingredients, cooking time, overall time, and instructions
Then you can search on partial field matches if you need to.

I was planning on something like that.  Unfortunately, I don't know a thing about MySQL or php.  And I'd like something I could pull up on my laptop anytime, but something online would certainly work, too.

Features I was thinking I'd eventually want:
Being able to have a database of "ingredients on hand" and match it to the lists of ingredients called for in a recipe, so you would have an automatic list of recipes you have the stuff for.  [this is the critical part].

Optionally, it would be nice to have:
* conversions (ie, if a recipe calls for "canned tomatoes", a conversion be written in [and perhaps made optional through a checkbox] that also accepts fresh "tomatoes", etc.
*A way of rating recipes on a scale, and then having it sort results by the ratings I've given them.
*It would be cool also if you could sort by overall time, though this is probably the least important feature in my mind.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

Well, to have it always available, you'd have to install MySQL and a web server for what I'm capable of. It's not that hard to do, actually, there are some packages out there that are already configured and you don't have to worry about security if you just deny the webserver access to the network with your firewall. XAMPP, is my package of choice, has apache, php, mysql, and perl by default. A couple other things to. And, of course, it's freeware.

Anyway, none of the rest of that is difficult. It's mostly a matter of adding fields to the table.

[Tink]

There is a free Web site that allows you to search by ingredient. It has a lot of recipes because anyone can submit them. Here is the address:

http://search.allrecipes.com/recipe/Ingredient.aspx

It's a great site for recipes in general. People can review the recipes and give them ratings, so you can get an idea of whether the recipe is any good.

[The Jade Knight]

The thing I don't like about that website is that searches by ingredient will list all recipes that contain ALL of the specified ingredients, as well as any other ingredients.  It does not limit recipes to what you have on hand, but rather limits what recipes by excluding anything that doesn't contain the ingredients you specify.  In addition, you can only specify up to four ingredients.

While I'm sure it's a great site, it's not what I'm looking for.

So, E, could you help me out with this?  I forget, do you have AIM or MSN?

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

I has both! the AIM one shoudl be in my profile